The official photoshoot and the red jerseys There was an official photoshoot in the morning. We also got to know the Kings and Queens of Kalahatty. The Queen of Kalahatty, Lena, is an impressive rider. She rides a Surly steel racer and rides hills like its a piece of cake. The King of Kalahatty, KKR, … [Read more…]
A late start Kalpetta was fully covered with dense fog. Nothing was visible outside the hotel. After a brief session of cleaning my drivetrain, I sat down and waited for the flag-off. We started at 8:00 am. The terrain was unforgiving. There were constant ups and downs. At times I was using my easiest gears … [Read more…]
Flag-off and the importance of being safe We started at around 7 today. Before that we had to deposit our luggage by 5:30 pm. We had about 1 hr 30 mins to take care of our bikes. I had already degreased and lubed by drivetrain yesterday. I pumped my tyres up and I was good … [Read more…]
Re-check and Flag Off I had to leave at 4:00 am in the morning in order to make it to Taj Yeshwantpur in time to drop off my luggage. Luckily Mogit was with me and taking care of some of the logistics became easier with the extra pair of hands. The race organisers fitted our … [Read more…]
An unusual source of motivation Let me put the most obvious thing out first – I don’t think that I have trained enough for this tour. The reason why I had decided to participate in this tour can be attributed to the blogs of Mr. Venkateswara Rao Navasi (also known as Lord Venky or BikeyVenky). He … [Read more…]
Yesterday, the members of Dark Project met at Korak’s house. It had more to do with having some fun time with friends (and gulp some food). Inadvertently, we ended up revisiting old songs inside Korak’s jam room. But before that, I must clear some air. So, here is… The reason why Dark Project disbanded Dark Project officially … [Read more…]
Every year, around this time, our department plans an outing to some place in the outskirts of Bangalore. This year, people voted for a resort called Urban Valley (check here). Google Maps labels this place as Bluemoon Retreat. I can only guess that they had undergone a rebranding exercise. You might be interested to read the 2 … [Read more…]
I kept bumping into Solanin in many automated suggestion lists—they seemed to predict what I might like, based on my tastes. A few months ago, I decided to trust these suggestion algorithms and pick the book up. In my opinion, it is a coming of age story of the protagonist, Meiko Inoue. Somebody who has read … [Read more…]
One of the caveats of running a website on a self-configured system is that the webmaster is in charge of all fail-safe, precautionary measures – not only for the data, but also for the server configuration – in case something strange happens. This is in stark contrast to the shared virtual hosting ethos where the webmaster … [Read more…]
I would like to elaborate this a bit more. Learning Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in two weeks has been tough. Prof. Ng’s Machine Learning course on Coursera explains the algorithm without getting into mathematical exposition or exposing the complexity behind the algorithms. In the end, my perseverance paid off. I managed to complete the quizzes and the programming … [Read more…]
