Banana Corn Meal Muffins - 4.5 Stars

Several months ago I purchased this cookbook called Veganomicon. It's pretty special and has quite a few new ideas for creating good vegan food to eat.

Today I made my first recipe out of it. Well, sort of. I didn't have some of the ingredients, so I improvised and my mini muffins came out pretty good. The recipe, as I made it, is on the bottom of this post.

Also, last night I made my first Indian meal using the variety of spices that I bought while I was there. It had a tomato base with orange lentils, pine nuts, coconut milk, and a bunch of other stuff. I had some Aloo Paratha in the freezer so I made that too.

Banana Corn Meal Muffins
1 cup rice dream
1 tsp distilled white vinegar
1.5 bananas
1/3 cup canola oil
1/3 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup white flour
1/4 cup garbanzo flour
1/4 cup cornmeal
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

mix the wet ingredients together after mashing the bananas on their own, mix the dry ingredients together separately, then mix them all together. Bake at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Anti Ergonomics

It's friday now and I've been working here in India for a week. My goal is to teach the two developers here enough that they could manage a particular code base on their own. They've been "working" for the past several months on this project, but have been unable to successfully make any changes. Admittedly, the code is very complicated and I think it was unreasonable to expect them to figure it out on their own, without much real-time assistance.

I spent the early part of this week going through examples of our template system, and giving them all the information they need to do work.

It's been very interesting to be doing this because of the bizarre dynamics I've experienced. One of the employees is very engaged and seems to be very excited about learning how to work on this code base. I think he's going to work out great. The other one, who happens to be senior to the first one, hasn't done anything except pretty much ask unrelated questions and request that meetings get pushed back (which I finally stopped doing). Supposedly he's a good developer, but I haven't seen any evidence of that. My judgment is that he likes to waste time and not work, if he can help it. If it were up to me, I think I'd get rid of him.

Everyday, after work, my co-worker and I have done some sightseeing or shopping.

Tuesday we went to Dilli Haat Market - which is this very cool market where each state in India is represented in terms of what's for sale. The variety was really impressive to see.

Wednesday we went to Karol Bagh Market (image on right) - another crazy market with less variety, but lots of interesting things to look at. I ate Puri Chaat from a street vendor here (picture below). I'm fine, I've had no problems.

Thursday we went to Akshardham, a swarinarayam temple that was built recently. (That's the picture above). It opened a year ago! It's amazing.

Tonight we have plans to go to this other market near our hotel and hang out with one of my co-worker's friends formerly from Cupertino, CA.

Tomorrow we're leaving at 5am (!) to make the trek to Agra to see the Taj Mahal.

Overloaded with Pollution

I don't know what happend. Maybe it's something to do with the weather. The pollution is so bad right now that you can't even see half a mile. It's thick and I might even be able to feel the particulates in the air. It's like grimy soup. It's very bad. Yuck!

Today was day one of work at the India office. My driver showed up at 7:30AM to take me to work and so I rushed out of here and skipped breakfast. I had been informed that he would show up at 9am. I'm slowly learning that it's okay to keep a driver waiting. I still think it's rude. But those are my American standards, not those here.

I ended up showing up so early at the office that they didn't know what to do with me, and they hadn't turned the lights on. They put me in a small, dark conference room for about an hour and a half. It was fine, I just worked on my slides and agenda for the work I'm doing here.

The rest of the day was uneventful, except for lunch. The president of the company took us out, and it was another delightful meal. I ordered tandoori potatoes. Yum!

Yesterday was a long day of exploring the tourist areas. I hired a driver and had an intense and long day of sight seeing. There were some really amazing places like:

• The Bahai House of Worship (a.k.a The Lotus Temple) I got to see part of a service there. It was very peaceful.
• The ISKON Temple (Hare Krishne Temple) The architecture is pretty amazing. Really.
• India Gate - A 42m-high stone memorial arch paying tribute to 90,000 Indian soldiers in WWI and other conflicts of that era.
  
• Gandhi Smriti - A huge park and monument to where Gandhi was assassinated. It's a nice reprieve from the urban jungle.
• Jama Masjid - This was easily the most impressive place, in terms of architecture, I saw all day. The courtyard of this Mosque can hold 25,000 people. It's supposed to be the largest in India. Unfortunately I couldn't go up the minaret because I was an unaccompanied female.
• Chowri Bazaar - This dense market was as active as an agitated bee hive.
• Humayan's Tomb - Built in the mid 16th century, it was the Taj Mahal before the Taj came about. Except that this was built by the wife for the husband.
  

That's my adventures so far. I hope you're enjoying them.

Bathroom Remodel

I could no longer stand the linoleum tile in our downstairs bathroom so I decided to pull it all out and start over. Tile, wood, other?

Exploring Photography

I've been having fun with my new camera...


This is an HDR (high dynamic range) composite from multiple exposures. I've had mixed results so far. The multiple exposures don't seem to consistently line up automatically. I'll try more tripod shots next time.



This was up at my mom's place when the power was out for a couple of days. My 9 yr old niece and I took this together. She hit the release and painted in the light, while I posed twice.


I was playing with some acrylic paints tonight and noticed a nice shape form when the paint was transfered from the tube to paper. Pulling them apart quickly made more interesting shapes, probably due to non-Newtonian behavior.


Stella gave me some company while I was painting. Isn't she adorable?


I screen printed my first shirt. All-in-all, I think it went really well for a 1st shot and I'm happy with it. I also took some material out of the shirt with the serger because it was too wide. Now the sleeves are a little long. The thing in my right hand that I'm looking at is the remote trigger that I am pushing to take the shot. It's proving to be a really nice addition to the camera.


Here are some more photography ideas I'd like to try:
Stereo Imaging -- Put a camera on a rail or use two separate cameras.
High Speed Event Capture such as popcorn exploding (apparently you can pop an entire kettle of popcorn by cooking it under pressure).
Fixed Focus Trigger. I'd like to catch Lewie in mid jump this way.

On another note, I saw an eye doctor recently. I had some time to kill while the dilation drops kicked in so I asked the doctor if he ever takes pictures of retinas. He said, "Yes, would you like to have pictures or yours?" I, of course said yes, and he led me to another room and took some shoots. He logged into his gmail account and sent them to me on the spot. The spot on the left is the optic nerve bundle and the dark spot on the right is the sensitive macula area.

A Whole New World

After finally settling into my originally planned hotel, I took a walk about in this neighborhood. The poverty was appalling. I've traveled a fair amount and I've never seen anything like it. It's overwhelming and chilling.

Crossing a street here is quite a bit like being the frog in frogger with a blind fold on. The space you consume is open space, as far as drivers are concerned. I am getting a slight thrill in frogging across these huge highways, but only when I'm in the mood. There were a couple times where I wished there was a traffic obeyed crosswalk. It takes a lot of energy to cross these major streets.

I just got back from Connaught Place. It's the center of New Delhi and also the main shopping area. It's a big circle with radial streets, quite a bit like Burning Man's street layout. Under part of the center park is the Palika Bazaar. I had thought the vendors were aggressive on the street (they were, the worst I've ever experienced), but the vendors in the Bazaar were 10 fold more aggressive. I only lasted about 20 minutes down there.

I'm glad I'm back at the hotel. I have this awful headache right now. I think between the pollution, the noise, and the amount of energy it takes to politely handle the obscenely aggressive vendors and everybody else who apparently wants to be my friend desperately, my head is unhappy. You wouldn't believe how loud it is everywhere. Everybody has gone out and purchased a custom loud horn for their rickshaw, car, or bike, and they are not hesitant to use it. It's so loud as a pedestrian, especially when you're trying to cross the street.

On a plus note I ate lunch at the shopping area and had saag paneer, and it was freakin amazing. Yum! I'd say currently my favorite part of India is the food and architecture. It's amazing so far.

New Delhi, India - Day 1

For those of you who don't know already, I was sent to India to work with a couple web developers that work for my company. They need some training on a particular code base that they will be taking over.

I arrived in New Delhi at about 1AM on Saturday. I went through customs and had a surprising experience. I brought trail mix with me (on advice from a co-worker who said to make sure I had some food handy.) On the customs form I declared that I had nuts and seeds. But nobody ever looked at anything I had. I just walked on out after getting my bag. The other fun part about this was the hotmail address used as a place to direct questions on the bottom of all the official looking custom signs everywhere.

The hotel driver was sent to the airport from the hotel where we will be staying. My one coworker is from Mumbai and she's spending this weekend with her family and meeting at work on Monday and my boss is coming a week later, so I'm on my own this weekend. Which suites me just fine.

There was a hotel snafu where they knew they had to pick me up from the airport, but somehow they messed up the hotel reservation so I didn't actually have a room when I arrived here at 2AM. They were full. It was suggested that I sit in the lobby and wait the 8 hours or so until somebody left and a room was ready for me. Keep in mind that this is a several hundred (US) per night place (chosen by my work) and that I had just finished flying for 24 hours. I ended up going down the street in the middle of the night and getting a room somewhere else.

My first impression of India is how spiritual it is. It seems like everybody has this calmness that we just don't have in the US. And despite the calmness in each person, this place is chaos. Take traffic for example. Everybody honks and flashes their lights. It's their way of making sure they're "seen". Trucks even have signs on their backs that say "please honk". It's the equivalent of "if you can't see my mirrors, I can't see you." They drive less than inches away from other cars. I'm told the rickshaw rides will be an adrenaline rush.

The other thing I noticed is how absolutely polluted it is here. Think of that great big fog cloud rolling into the SF area. Now add a bit of grey, add some eye, nose, lung burn and a bunch of trash all over the ground everywhere; and you've got New Delhi. The parts I've seen so far, at least. I don't think it's going to be cleaner anywhere else in this city though because I'm in the expensive, fancy part.

I also noticed the sheer amount of waiting there is everywhere. Everybody waits while a single person does their job. Like last night. The driver that picked me up, the bell person, and the security guard all stood right by me while we waited for the desk clerk to figure out that they were full and they didn't have a room for me. It was a bit strange to me.

Well, I'm off to explore now. I'm seeking some yummie Indian food.