TrafficView®: Awesomely solving India’s traffic problem.

Or

Where I ramble on before getting to the point, and then get really tired so I cut it short. And also use excessive commas.

Google Maps have really upped their game in India. They've added traffic information in the Metros, and are planning to bring in street view soon too. With your Android phone, you can tell where your friends (victims) are, and what their ETA of arrival to a location is. Google Navigation has come to India on Android. Maps now have a textured background to indicate topography. You can geotag your photos and people can view them on a map. And most interestingly, Google maps now even has an overlay to show the location of Wikipedia entries on your map, allowing you to see the places of interest close to you.  Both the Traffic as the Wikipedia view can be turned on from the overlay panel on the top right.

Traffic and Wikipedia overlay on Google Maps

All in all Google Maps really shows the power that technology wields in this information generation.  And also, it’s not Apple Maps. Zing.

Hold on. Let’s not be lulled into a false sense of security. Trusting GMaps has led to some awesome fiascos, like turning off a well lit and broad highway into a narrow pitch black road surrounded by fields, which goes by an innocuous name like St Andrews Path of Redemption on Google Maps, but is probably better known to the locals as Rape Lane. After turning onto such a road on the way back to Norwich from the Peak District thanks to Google, it took about five minutes for our fear to overcome our faith in technology, and we performed a hasty u-turn, leaving the axe murderers frothing in frustration down the road.

On the positive side, Google Maps have allowed us to experience wonders previously unknown to civilized man.  Driving in Wales, we decided to toss our paper map and caution to the winds, after which Google decided to show us the meaning of fear by balancing us on the edge of a cliff somewhere in Snowdonia. The view was very nice, though.  Or that time we turned off into a dirt track and had to drive for five miles followed by an angry farmer in a tractor before we found a field to turn in. On reflection, I can’t really blame Google for that; it may have been a product of a driver/navigator conflict (to clarify, I was neither).

But as bountiful as the bloopers were while driving around the UK, they cannot really compare to the magnificence of the mistakes we made blindly following our phones, while driving around the Indian subcontinent. On our way to Choki Dhani at Jaipur (more about that later) from Bharatpur recently, we put our trust in dear faithful Google. Highway, highway, highway… oh hold on; that turn looks super awesome and will get us to our destination faster than a unicorn can shit out a rainbow. ‘Dear Google’, says I, ‘you wouldn’t ever steer me wrong; let us take this turn and embark on this magical journey hand in hand.’

This was the last time I smiled for a month.

The road tapered off till we found our self in the center of a village market in a dust patch which followed the outline of my car exactly.  Google Maps had by now decided that we were in the centre of a lake, and indicated we swim in a north by north west direction. Times like these bring out the iron in a man’s soul, and I bravely struck out in the aproximate direction Gmaps indicated, followed by feral dogs nipping at my tires and cow’s scratching their arseholes on my side view mirrors.

The aforesaid iron turned out to be not in my soul but in my head, as the road took us deep into one of those Rajasthani villages where automobiles are probably outlawed by the Khap Panchayats, and old men with bright red turbans and skin the colour and consistency of tanned nutsack stared silently at us with eyes which screamed, ’We will burn you and use the ashes to fertilize our corn’.  The road grew narrower too, obviously just meant for bicycles and lynch mobs, and sparks flew off the side of my tortured vehicle as I accelerated through the enclosing walls, knowing that to stop would be to seal our death warrant.

At one point I think I drove through someone’s courtyard.

We emerged from the village like Meatloaf’s bat out of hell, leaving a few puffs of feathers to mark where the chickens had exploded as I hit them, and were soon driving through fields of sugarcane: the kind where the axe murderer hides the bodies in all those movies. 

Scenic Detours!

The road, which had long since abandoned any pretense of actually leading somewhere, was now just a mud track, and we soon skidded to a halt in front of a pit half full of glutinous clay. ‘WE CAN MAKE IT!’, screamed my intrepid navigator. ‘KEEP ON GOING!’, screamed Google.  ‘WE’RE GOING TO DIE HERE’, screamed my bladder!  And so, I reversed for ‘bout half a kilometer , past a gawping goatherd, and drove back to the highway, rejoining it a few kilometers after where I had originally turned off, thus ending both my adventure, and the excessive use of commas in this sentence.

I once used quintuple negation separated by commas in an English essay, causing my teacher to go into retirement.

So, besides these very minor inconveniences, Google Maps is great! It’s the wave of the future, and this brings me to the meat of this post, which hyperbole and punctuation have prevented me from reaching till now.

The problem: My daily commute to office involves driving from one city into another (Indirapuram to Sector 62 in Noida) across a national highway. It’s a 3 kilometer drive. It takes me an hour. Why? Because the average office going Delhi person is a crazed rabid wanker with shit for brains and the traffic sense of an autistic orangutan. The daily dose of traffic rage that Delhi brings will take me to an early grave. Though there are 4 routes to cross the highway, one never knows which route will be FUBAR by some asshole trying to go horizontally through a tunnel, or a pack of insane auto rickshaws driving in the wrong direction. The time and location of these traffic snarls cannot be predicted in advance and change hourly.

Route options for my commute

The solution: TrafficView ® - A web camera at each of the 4 route options steaming live video onto a site. Before I set out, I’ll just fire up the feed on my laptop or phone, and make an informed decision on which route will be less likely to make me kill myself.  The interface and pricing will be simple… an overlay on Google maps will show you which locations cameras are available at, and you can subscribe to a feed for a fee per camera per month.

TrafficView!

TrafficView® could also be clubbed with the route options of Google and their live traffic information, recommending cameras to subscribe to based on the destination you want. As more and more people subscribe to a particular camera, its icon grows larger on the Map overlay, indicating its heightened usefulness.

I’ve just blown your mind, haven’t I? Google, are you listening?

Marriage ala TRex

A Brand New Day

MDTL Tutorials - Fedora and XP

Well the Google Docs publishing is shite, so link here for

Viren Joky's

Quick and Dirty guide to dual booting Windows with Fedora 9 (Sulphur)

XKCD.COM

Witty and poignant. Check out xkcd. A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

 

  

  

Supersize me (or) I wrote this whole post just to work in the last sentence

I'm deathly afraid of travelling on planes. Crashing and going to hell in a fireball of molten metal is the least of my worries, however. No, what really scares me is the torture my knees will go through for the next eight hours. Because once I wedge myself into my seat and my knees are jammed into the back of the seat in-front of me, I'm sure not going anywhere till they pry me out with a crowbar. No wonder I've developed good bladder control.

And of course the diminutive girl next to me has enough space to stretch her legs out, do a few lunges and open her food tray and rest her feet on top of it. At which point I finally loose my patience and smack her upside the head. To which she responds by biting me.... In the knee.

People always envy tall people. But believe me, the world does it's best to compensate for what few advantages we have by trying to compress us into the tiniest spaces meant for normal mortals. When you can't hear the radio while driving, because your knees are blocking your ears, it's time to pull over and set fire to the car.

And dont get me started on the whole opposite sex thing. How can you make out how a girl looks when all you can see is the top of her head. I once dated this girl for two months, she had a haircut, and I couldn't recognise her any more. We broke up shortly after. Nowdays, I duck and weave like a boxer when meeting women, trying to get a glimpse of their face.

All in all, it's quite tough. I have repeated concussion from having knocked my head off various doorframes, ledges and overhangs. And that's why I have this lazy eye. Now, I just keep my huge fat head tucked into my shoulders. and envy all the small people around me.

Because sometimes, there's nothing better than a little head.

Carpe Diem, 2008

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song
still in them. - Thoreau

That is the saddest but truest thing I have read. People travel through life shackled to their crosses. Only those of us unaware of their burden can ever be content. The rest of us peer up to the night sky through the bars of our school, our job... our life.

Few are those who dare to unfasten the shackles, to unbolt the shutters to walk in the light beyond. Because isn't that what society teaches us; shoulder your responsibilities, do the right thing, be part of the team. And most of us, cowed into submission, resolve to 'do the right thing by others', never imagining that maybe we were intended to do the right thing by ourselves.

And in the end when we look back, is the path not stewn with regret? For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been’…

So to you gentle reader, I entreat; live your life to the fullest and remember, your biggest responsibility is to yourself. Let not the fears, aspirations or opinions of your parents, your friends or society dictate the terms of your life.

It's not too late.

And so this 2008, Carpe Diem, baby.. Carpe Diem.