The Chocolate Room...

It had been a while that I had been to any coffee shop for a hang out. Baiju has come here from New Delhi and Yogi suggested to hang out tonight at a "Chocolate Room" - a newly opened coffee/chocolate shop near Barista.

The place looked nice from the outside.

The entrance...

The counter a typical but had lot more varieties than Barista...

The ambience is interesting.

It sells all these items too... In glass drawers are some assorted and very expensive chocolates for sale.

Cups for chocolate drinks are cool in shape and conformable to hold and drink... It does not charge if you accidentally drop and break it.

Yogi ordered this drink...

Akshar, Baiju and Yogi... In comparison with heavy duty Baiju and almost heavy duty Yogi, Akshar seems to be from Ethiopia...

I noticed that my iPhone camera quality is deteriorating... Most of the time, the camera does not work on the startup and I have to slap the phone few times while praying hard to get the camera out of MTV mode... New 3G iPhone hasn't been cracked yet and I have no intention to buy it even if it can be cracked. So, for a while, I need to live with this phone and its broken camera... too bad too bad...

Before going for the hang out, I had stumbled upon a blog called "The Reichert Family". Its very interesting blog and I did flip through all its pages. The author seems to be a wife of a US marine and a wonderful mom. One of her posts mentioned Lake Tahoe and it reminded me of my visit of Lake Tahoe in 2004 with Palak, Prashant and Ipsita...

South Lake Tahoe from one of the mountains peek...

Palak, Ipsita and Prashant...

Ipsita and Prashant in Lake Tahoe...

While inserting these pictures, I again reminded myself to get a new DSLR now... Best Buy has a special sale on 450D and is about $50 less than its listed price. Dell is offering it at even less but delivery is 2 weeks... There are some other Internet shops which offer this camera at further reduced price but I am scared of buying from them. May be I will hand pick it from B&H. I am not opting for its kit lens (17-55mm IS one). I will buy 17-85mm IS one in place of it. My dream list also includes 50-200mm L lens and a battery grip with two additional batteries... Let my dream comes true soon!

Just bad news...

It was an overcast day and while I was about to leave for the office, it rained for a while. Once the rain stopped, I decided to go office for couple of hours and then to pack up my bag for a Delhi trip.

While I was driving, I noticed a very happy kid as a pillion rider in front of me. It was indeed a tempting scene for my iPhone camera but the mother was driving at some speed I could not slow down my bike. I dared to pull out my iPhone from the pocket and managed to turn on the camera. Fortunately, the camera was in a good working condition and was not in MTV mode.
It was very difficult to frame a pose due to moving traffic as well as keeping the balance while driving. But I managed to get the picture and it did turn out good. Have a look at the full size picture and let me know what you think...

I came back from office and waited for the car to come and take me to the train station. It started raining heavily and the car arrived 30 mins late. There was still 45 mins left for Rajdhani Express to depart and we started driving to the station. When I was just two Km away from the station, we got stuck in traffic. Some religious procession was going on amid the rain and it had blocked whole traffic. We could not even back up and take another route for the train station. I kept my hope that the train would wait for me but my hope was as wrong as my other hopes... it left without me... Too bad too bad... And further bad was that I did not get any refund of the ticket as it was non refundable...

Anyway, since I already said about one bad news, let me also mention another...

What you see above is a "Sketch" screen of my iPhone... Do you see a partially empty band on upper half of the screen? That is a very new problem I got with this phone... iPhone has a multi-touch screen but this screen does not work properly in that band area... Do you notice that there are no horizontal lines in that area? Even if I do draw horizontal lines in that band area, they do not appear. Vertical lines do appear but many of them are broken in the middle... So, in short, the touch screen in that area does not work properly.

Now, I fear that soon my iPhone would die and I have to find another phone to use. My Palm Treo is with Honey and Akshar is using 6230i leaving me with no spare phones. I asked Sissie but she said she too does not have any spare one... So how?