This is why I dislike "gourmet" food

Looks fancy and colourful but this "appetiser" just killed my appetite. Keep it simple you chefs out there. When we are hungry we prefer edible over pretentious. Thank you.
V

Onwards to San Diego

Los Angeles looks interesting but awfully dirty. Next weekend shall be spent exploring this place some more.

Right now, off to San Diego and then Dallas in the evening!

Delayed flight

So I'm gonna chill some more :)

Lazy statues

In Kerala, even the statues are lazy !

Treasure hunt

First part of the day spent treasure hunting and 2nd part mostly spent on the backwaters!

Breakfast view

Very very awesome breakfast area. The view will make u forget the excellent food spread!

In the houseboat

Taking a few hours ride in a boat on the lovely backwaters. Definitely a multi-day activity for which I will return soon !!

Team building!

Solve riddles, find clues, get bike parts and build a cycle. 

Then, race the cycle you built!

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Sent from my iPhone 

Celebrating the success of LTE

And also ofcourse the awesome work we did in 2010!!

Team exercise

Solve riddles, find clues, get bike parts and build a cycle. 

Then, race the cycle you built!

Infinity pool!

Awesome hotel this leela. I have to come back here in cooler climes! Awesome awesome view !!

Switching to the Mac: Part II

Well, the summary of the first half of my experiment it is that Mac OS is simply not ready to be integrated into a predominantly Microsoft Exchange led office environment, and frankly, it isn't Apple's fault, it is Microsoft's and no, I don't mean this as a fan boy.

The reason it is not ready is one and only - Microsoft Outlook, an application that is quite frankly the cornerstone of all things office as it seamlessly integrates email, calendar and live meetings (conf calls) which are basically 3 of the MOST used functions inside a business environment.

Having found Apple's Mail and calendar apps to be woefully inadequate, I was quite excited to see that Microsoft was releasing office 2011 with the first ever Mac version for Outlook. But unfortunately, the outlook version is largely unusable. Let me illustrate a few 'issues'

1. Just general email download is EXCRUCIATINGLY slow. It can take upto 15 minutes to download 1MB attachments. Downloading them via webmail takes about 4 seconds.

2. Calendaring: Inability to see multiple calendars at once is a pain. We have a ton of shared calendars for travel, holidays, company events etc and not being able to see them separately and/or individually is a real pain.

3. Live Meeting: There is NO live meeting plug-in for Outlook 2011 which basically means that I cannot setup conference calls with people - a more than regular feature when synching across global teams. Ughh.

4. Sent items: This is the MOST stupid implementation of sent items ever. When sending an email from inside outlook 2011, the email does not automatically move to the sent items, but it is RE-DOWNLOADED from the sent items on the server! This means that if u are on a slow connection, you have to first bear the pain of uploading a large prezo and then wait for it to painfully download on the sent items folder.

These are just some of the MANY MANY issues but while others i can live with, these are just deal breakers for me and even though I paid a stupendously reduced $9 for office, I am feeling it is not even worth THAT.

And here is the worst part - if this was Apple's fault, Microsoft could wash its hands and walk away, but it is not. It is entirely Microsoft's problem because Outlook is made by microsoft as is the Exchange server 2010 so the integration between the 2 should be flawless.

With that said, I have to sadly conclude that integrating the Mac into a predominantly exchange centric environment is largely a failure and until Outlook gets fixed, or Apple upgrades the Mail app to compete, I cannot shutdown my Win 7 notebook for good.

Stay tuned for an update on moving from my blackberry to the iPhone 4.

Preaup

Built by rajendra varman in tenth century. Built of bricks.

Siem reap region has a strong Buddhist and hindu influence and ha many temples dedicate to buddha and many indian gods. Shiva is ofcourse the local fav.

The region has 512 temples and Angkor wat area alone has 255!

Banteay srei

Temple of the women. Called because the locals compare the intricate carvings with the beauty of the woman.

Otherwise known as isvarahpura. Dedicated to shiva, brahma and Vishnu. Shiva is a very popular god here. Temple was built in the tenth century but was broken by the Thai and a forest fire.

Roadside dhaba

More countryside

Cambodia country side

Looks a lot like india. Roads are like any roads in northern india. Patchy and with 2 wheelers and cattle.

At bandhavgarh

As the new vacation begins, this is an interesting statue face ( is there a word for such things?) thats at the resort tiger den. Apparently the owner used to work at the taj. It shows. Rooms are impeccably done.

Bandhavgarh has max tiger population for per square foot of jungle. Hopefully we will get to see some!

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Sent from my iPhone

Switching to the Mac: The background

I am an Apple fan and I am also a Microsoft fan - those of you who know me, know this.
Apple has come a long way since they did their first iPods. I think Macs are awesome for multimedia and have quite a few nifty 'work' features that make me wish Windows had them too! Spotlight for one, Quick view for another, fast boot times, awesomely fast network connectivity (ability to connect, not necessarily the speed), built in screen sharing with iChat (although OCS has it now) Time machine, Keynote etc. are just a few.

Microsoft though, also does a damn decent job of making pretty good products.
Sure they, lost their way a bit with Vista (which had huge sales btw) but hey, shit happens. They got the Zune right (sales are not necessarily a good indicator of a great product:)) , Windows 7 is pretty good, Xbox 360 is awesome. Office 2007/2010 is exceptionally good, Windows Phone 7 rocks - so, in all, they get more things right for most people than they get wrong - and for someone that dominates most of the markets they are in, that is a big statement to make.

However, the device that my life actually revolves around is from neither of these companies - it is the Blackberry. It has my emails, it has my social networking and chat clients. Being a stickler for carrying as few devices as possible, BB is also my primary 'mobile internet' devices (Opera Mini to the rescue) Having been a BB user for the last 5 years and waxing lyrical about its awesome enterprise integration, I have finally gotten fed up of how far behind it is w.r.t other devices. I mean, it's terrible. Really. The phone app is an after thought, the browser is terrible. Video playback is average at best, and its killer app of push email is becoming hygiene on other systems.

So finally after using every major BB they have made (from 79xx onwards till my current Tour - yeah, I broke quite a few of them) I decided to bite the bullet and switch to iPhone 4 - more out of irritation due to a constantly freezing up phone with a battery life that was less than a day and RIM's inability to fix issues I have been bitching about since my first BB. Plus iPhone 4 has a better camera, takes better videos and god it's beautiful :)

Then recently, I read about Outlook coming to the Mac and this led me to think about moving to Mac + iPhone entirely and really see first hand how 'ready' the Mac platform is to work in a windows dominated enterprise environment. Having been a journalist in a past life, I have used the Mac in a work environment but we weren't as entrenched into an MS environment with BBs and Outlook and Calendaring so the switch was really quite un-dramatic. Here however, we have a multi-billion dollar global enterprise running the latest greatest from Microsoft and where BBs, Outlook and calendaring are like oxygen.

Is iPhone + Mac ready to get integrated into this or is still a lot of talk by Apple with little feature implementations that really matter? This is an experiment to find out exactly that.


The Beginning
As with any deviation from standard IT issued hardware, the first challenge began by convincing them to support a non-standard device. This led to a VERY pleasant surprise where our awesome IT team basically said as long as you buy your own device, we will support the notebook and the phone plan. I was in luck, I already have my devices so this was a non-issue - yeah I am a tech junkie so I just basically have devices lying around so I can check them out - since I am no longer a journo, I don't have companies lining up to give it to me for free :)

So to summarize, I will be moving from a windows 7 powered HP laptop with Office 2007 and the blackberry tour to a Macbook Pro 13"  running Office 2011, iWork 09 and and the iPhone 4. Also, my company runs MS Exchange 2007.

Stay tuned for more frequent updates as my experiment progresses!