Thank god for recovery software!

Isn’t it utterly and absolutley frustrating when something goes wrong with the memory card in the camera and you lose all the photographs? It’s not about just losing data, it’s about losing memories, which is quite painful. After googling for photo recovery software, I mainly found a lot of licensed, have-to-buy-to-use softwares. A few of them misled me and when I downloaded their trial version, it tantalizingly showed a set of recovered pictures, but prompted me to buy before I could actually get the pictures back! It’s not that I didn’t want to buy, I’d have almost done it, except that I didn’t have my US credit card anymore. I’d have to call my friend there (wake her up in fact) and then make her buy it and send it to me. Considering the state I was in, I couldn’t wait for a few more hours to do that. I wanted my pictures back rightaway! So I continued installing trial versions of all the software I’d downloaded. At last, found one which not only recovered all my pictures, it recovered my previous trip’s deleted pictures too! (And it recovered more pics than all the other software I’d tried earlier). Basically none of the pictures are deleted from the card, only the links (actual path to the file) get removed from the file allocation table, so that new pictures can be linked. What the software does is, fishes out the actual path (and hence the picutre itself) of the un-linked files. Read this and this for more information. What a relief to get all my memories..uhh…pictures back!

p.s. During the interval spanning between losing them and recovering them, it was painful, how in my head, there was this slow motion repeat of all the good pictures clicked that were lost. You know, including all the details, of what happened before, during and after taking those pictures. My mind works against me  at times. <Sigh>

Phew!

At last, I’m done with posting all my old travelogues. That took some effort! I’m glad I have everything in one place now. Back to the present! Haven’t gone out of town in a while (it’s been 6 weeks since we got back from Kodai), but hey, we have a plan to travel this weekend…yippeee

The Windy City

(Write up, July 2007. I was in Chicago for 5.5 months; Jan mid 2007 to June end 2007)

Chicago. The city of jazz and blues. And the city which was my temporary home for a few months. I stayed in a suburb of Chicago called Hoffman Estates (borderside, so almost in Schaumburg). It was bitterly cold and and it was snowing. But it’s beautiful. The white blanket covering the entire area…Some lovely houses all around, that look like fairy take castle with the snow on them…

I was back in the US after more than a year. It’s such a stark contrast, from Scottsdale (Arizona) to here. Poles apart in almost everything…especially in terms of weather!! How do I feel…hmm…not happy, not sad, just normal. Not excited, not really anything much…it’s like “you have to do what you have to do”. Seeing my project deadlines, it didn’t look like I’d get to travel much. I was mistaken thankfully, I did get to travel! Ha, knowing me, that shouldn’t be a surprise, now should it? :-)

Living in Schaumburg is almost like being in India.

Scottsdale

(Write up, December 2005)

When I first heard I was going to the USA on a project from work, I was thrilled to bits. Also very nervous and excited. Forget being abroad, I hadn’t even flown in a plane ever! Then I found out I’d be in a place called Scottsdale in Arizona (AZ). What? Scottsdale? Huh? The maximum I knew about Arizona then was that it was a desert (the Sonoran desert) and it had Grand Canyon. Period.

 This was back in December 2004 when I landed there. I lived in Scottsdale for 10.5 months (till October 2005) and I’ve enjoyed every bit of it.

SFO

(Travelogue, August 2005)

San Francisco is in a league of its own. My friend lives in San Jose, so it was a good opportunity to catch up and tour the city. The drive from San Jose to Frisco took about an hour. On the way we stopped by my friend’s office and then left the car in the bart (bay area railway) station and took the bart to Frisco. It was love at first sight. Downtown is a delight. All the narrow, super curvy and winding roads, the beautiful landscape, the culture, the food and the people are just fabulous. Take a deep breath, enter the city and be conquered!

Mackinac Island

(Mackinaw city and island, travelogue, May 2007)

After debating for hours (since there were 10 of us for this), we finally decided Mackinac Island in Michigan to be the Memorial weekend getaway destination. The drive to Mackinaw City was great. You know how it is when a whole bunch of people get together, there’s bound to be a lot of fun and noise! We would have loved to stay in the island, but there are specific timings for the ferry that would take us there, so we didn’t want to risk reaching late and then not having a place to sleep. So we reached Mackinaw city quite late in the night (after a speeding ticket on the way!) and found our tiny cottages just by Lake Huron, with the view of the island and the Mackinac bridge. The bridge is a suspension type one, similar to the Golden Gate in San Francisco.  This bridge connects the lower and upper peninsulas (connects Mackinaw City to St Ignace). One side of the bridge is Lake Michigan, and the other side is Lake Huron.

The first day, we took the ferry and went to the island. There are no automobiles in the island. Only bicycles and horse carriages (horse taxis!).

Uttaranchal

(Uttaranchal, a brief write up, November 2005)

Uttaranchal or Uttarakhand as it is now known (what’s with the changing names that the government is obsessed with these days?). We had this 15 day vacation all neatly planned out. We flew to Delhi, took a train from there to Kathgodam, took a bus to to Nainital, then took a taxi to Naukuchiyatal. Yes, 90% of the tourists go to Nainital, but well we are not tourists, are we? So, Naukuchiyatal is this beautifully laid back place, very picturesque. We (hubby dear and yours truly) were staying at a resort that dierctly over looked the lake. (“-tal” in Hindi means lake, there are about 7 lakes in this area. Some are Nainital, Naukuchiyatal, Bhimtal, Sattal (I donn’t remember all of them now). We didn’t do anything much for 3 days apart from eating some delicious food, taking long walks, a bit of horseriding, a bit of boating in the lake, and reading. It’s the perfect place for a quiet vacation. 

We then headed towards Kasuani.

The Queen of hill stations

Or the princess (I’m not sure whether they call it princess or queen ‘coz I saw it being referred to by both names!) of hill stations, Kodaikanal was our choice of a 4 day much needed break from the hectic city life. Kodai is about 600 kms from Bangalore. We took the overnight bus and reached in the morning at about 10 AM in the Kodai town.  A lot of people had warned us saying the weather might be bad (since most of South India then was under the grip of heavy rains), you’re going for 4 days, and if it pours, you have no choice but to stay cooped up inside! Thankfully for us, all 4 days (in mid-August 2007) had lovely pleasant weather, got a little cold in the mornings and late evenings. The place where we stayed overlooked the star shaped Kodai lake and all the mountains all around. One problem with Kodai is that, during the on-season time, it gets terribly clogged with tourists. Now, that is something you’d want to avoid. Without crowd, Kodai is a delight.

The Smokies

(Vacation in the Smoky Moutains and Charlotte, April 2007)

The great smoky mountains, I finally went there last weekend! This was one of the places that was in my must-see list when I was in the US the last time, but somehow things didn’t work out and I didn’t get to go there. Being given another chance, I of course jumped at it. Another reason being, one of my close friends lives in Charlotte. So it was a good proposition to spend time with her and also see the Smokies with her (she being pretty much the authority on it since she’s gone there so many times owing to the proximity). I left it all to her to plan our trip.

     Landed in Charlotte on a bright, warm and sunny Thursday evening. Trust me , it was a sight for sore eyes to see so much greenery and pretty flowers in bloom all around. Charlotte’s a lovely place…winding roads, a small downtown, oops sorry uptown as they call it, not too many skyscrapers. It has the perfect blend of a city that’s in harmony with nature. Queen city is the right name! Being treated to good home food was one of the added pleasures of the trip.

A weekend outing

(First travelogue of Kerala, November 2006)

Well, well I do surprise myself sometimes After all that cribbing about being in Trivandrum, I never expected to have an eventful weekend…thought I’d take it easy, sleep, watch a lot of TV and of course read (Inheritance of Loss, it’ going ok so far).

Friday evening I got talking to a couple of colleagues and we decided we’d visit the Kovalam beach. So Saturday afternoon, we set out (about 7 of us in a hired cab) to the Museum, art gallery and zoo which was on the way. Started off with the art gallery which was great. They had a lot of Raja Ravi Varma’s oils (which were so life like) and the ones I liked most were the Roerich paintings (Nicholas and his son’s), those were brilliant! All of the Roerich paintings depict life in the Himalayas.