Nothing Official Here: June 2010

What the hell is Imipramine HCl???

Since few weeks, I had been experiencing a pain running down from a hip joint to the bottom of my left leg. It sure wasn’t muscular pain nor it was fatigue. So when it became unbearable, I went to the Dr and he asked me to undergo an X-Ray of the hip joint. A conventional X-ray was a bit confusing and thus I underwent a digital X-ray for more clarity. This X-ray did not show any abnormalities nor a need of a heap replacement :)! So, he prescribed me some pain killers.
Even after taking these pain killers for few days, the pain did not vanish. I started having a burning sensation at the hip joint and under my feet. I also occasionally used to get flickers there. Looking at these symptoms, the Dr prescribed me some multivitamins once in morning and Impramine HCL 25mg once before going to bed. He cautioned me that I will have longer sleep then my usual one. I was fine with it.
First night, I took this medicine around 10pm and fell asleep around 12 midnight. I woke up at 20 mins past noon – yes, thats 1220HRS next day… Fine. not a big deal. I got ready and had a cup of coffee. I came back to my room and felt sleepy. Blaming it to the heat of the day, I decided to take an afternoon nap. I woke up at 5 in evening. It was too early for the dinner and thus, I ended up with another cup of coffee. I was lazy and while waiting for dinner, I took another nap of two hours… Had a dinner at 9 and at 11pm, I took another doze of the medicine. By midnight, I was flat on my bed and woke up at 11am next morning.
Same as last day, after having a cup of coffee and doing some mundane tasks like mail checking/replying and few phone calls, I again fell sleepy. So what do you do? Go sleep, right? Thats exactly I did and ended up with a five hours sleep. Woke up just around dinner time and after dinner, again finished some routine tasks and fell asleep at midnight till noon next day.
This kept on happening for almost six days and today, it was too much. I decided to have a look at what this Imipramine HCl medicine is which is making me so sleepy.
An internet search of this medicine got me following information:

This medication is used to treat depression. It is also used with other therapies for the treatment of nighttime bed-wetting (enuresis) in children. Using this medication to treat depression may improve your mood, sleep, appetite, and energy level and may help restore your interest in daily living. Imipramine can help your child control nighttime bed-wetting.

Hehe… do I feel the need of this medicine? The warning section of this drug says something like:

Antidepressant medications are used to treat a variety of conditions, including depression and other mental/mood disorders. These medications can help prevent suicidal thoughts/attempts and provide other important benefits.

WHAT????? Antidepressant??? Am I depressed??? Do I have a mental or a mood disorder??? Do I get a suicidal thoughts????
Whoooaaaa!!! Maybe! Who knows????!!!!!
The side effects of this medicine are listed as:

Dry mouth, blurred vision, headache, drowsiness, dizziness, constipation, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, stomach cramps, weight gain/loss, and increased sweating may occur.

Hmmm… Dry mouth? I dont think so.
Blurred vision? I am already bifocal.
Headache? Nope.
Drowsiness? Sure.
Dizziness? Yea.
Constipation? Yes, very much.
Nausea? Dont know.
Stomach cramps? No.
Weight gain/loss? Haven’t been on scale recently.
Increased sweating? Yea, its 40C outside. One ought to sweat in such heat.
Looking at this page where some of the patients who had expressed their experiences with this medicine, its indeed scary and funny! Some lost the memory for few hours and one became jittery. The first one on this page is so funny I can not put it here!!!
So what should I do now??? I am so confused…

The focus dilemma

Indeed, it all depends on the focus – no matter what, how and why…. if there is no focus, there is no value…!

No no no no no, I am not preaching anything here… I am just saying about the focusing of a lens of a camera. Continue reading if you are not bored yet…

These are two lenses for Canon Cameras. Both are of fixed focal length of 50mm. The bib baby on left has aperture which can be as wide as upto 1.0 (f1.0) and the kiddy on the right has max. aperture of 1.8 (f1.8). Just a .8 difference. But the street price of the big baby is about $2500 for the used one whereas that kiddy is available on Amazon at $100.

This morning, I wanted to check their performance. I ended up with a setup as below:

It is the battery test very common to check the front or back focusing of the lens. Here, I used it to check the sharpness of both lenses.

The big one looks like this on 7D. Its a very impressive and pro look and will surely get you different treatment from fellow photographers.

Same camera but with 50mm-f1.8 lens and you can notice the difference. It looks so kiddy!

This is the frame I got from the big baby. Look at the background blur. Thats the beauty of this lens.

This is the frame I got from the kiddy lens. Look at the difference in the bokeh… the one with big lens is obviously uniform and non-disturbing… whereas the one above is a bit distracting from the subject.

But the real test I was looking for is a sharpness and not the background bokeh…

This is the 100% crop of the one taken with the big baby. You need to click it to see at 100%.

And this is the 100% crop of the kiddy lens. I hardly see any difference in the sharpness from above picture and on the contrary, I find this one sharper than the one with the big baby.

Check the 100% crops of big baby at 1.0 and 1.2 below…
At f1.0… its so out of focus…

at f1.2… its no better…

So, it seems that even big baby is so expensive, it is not producing any sharp results at apertures the kiddy lens does not offer.

The conclusion? Save $2400 and go for the kiddy. Even if you break it for any reason, you loose just $100… No wonder why big baby is nicknamed “Museum lens”!

Technorati Tags: Canon 7D,50mm-f1.0,50mm-f1.8,photography

Saga de London – Part 2

One evening, I got a chance to be in London’s biggest mall – Westfield Mall…

It has a gorgeous interior.

Noticed “All Saints” Store… it displayed a matrix of Sewing machines…

Elephants from Elephant Parade were placed there as well!

And of course, Starbucks!

Other evening, I had a good late night hangout with London gang at Tinseltown…
Its an amazing Milk-shake place. One has to book the table in advance!

One day, Anilbhai took me to Stratford – the birthplace of Williams Shakespeare.. It was raining for the first half of the day and too difficult to take any pictures at some of the historical houses like Anne Hathway’s cottage, Mary Arden’s courtyard, Hall’s croft and Nash’s house and New Place. But by the time we reached to Shakespeare’s birthplace, the rain had stopped and it was a clear sky.
This is a house in which Williams Shakespeare was born. Unfortunately, all I know about Shakespeare is that he was a great writer and he wrote some dramas like Romeo-Juliet, Hamlet etc… but I was excited to visit all these places. It was good time I had.

Finally, a day before I was to fly back to home, Jiten and Jal took me to a sightseeing tour of London through hop-on hop-off bus tour – the Big Bus Tour.

We boarded the bus from Hyde park and while we were waiting for the next bus to arrive, we had a quick look at the “Speaker’s corner” where anyone can come and speak about anything… Current speaker had a reasonable crowd in front of him. I was surprised that people in London do stop by to listen… maybe they have plenty of spare time to spend!

Some of the places we passed through this bus tour:

Thames River…

Trafalgar square… The famous place where people used to feed the pigeons… As these pigeons were creating too much liter, the authorities banned feeding them and flew all of them off.

Big Ben tower..

Tower bridge of London…

Tower bridge of London from other side…

London’s Mayor’s office…

Cleopatra's Needle…

The tour offered a free cruise trip from Tower bridge to London Eye…

Before we boarded the cruise, we had a good break at this amazing Starbucks… Surprisingly, it was playing old Hindi songs…

Before we called a day, we passed through Kensington Palace where Lady Diana used to live.

Next day, I flew back home. LHR-DXB flight was a bit delayed and I had no time to loiter in Dubai airport before catching an onward flight.

Saga de London – Part 1

Sometimes, surprise hits you when you are least expecting it… It was a hot summer day which was started very early at 4:30am… By the noon, I had lost more than a couple of KGs of water from my body in form of perspiration. The heat was terrific but not powerful enough to stop me enjoying what was happening in front of me. After the lunch, anything my body needed was an undisturbed rest for a couple of hours. My phone rang when I was in a deep sleep. This was the beginning moment of the upcoming trip to London.

Fearing that second spell of ash clouds have still held Heathrow airport hostage, I logged on to Heathrow website and to my relief, the airport was reopened for all flights. Emirates was offering good pricing and I was prompt in booking my ticket.

It was a morning flight and online checking helped me cut the long queue at the airport. After security check when I was about to board the bus to the place, a ground staff member approached me and handed me a note indicating that I had been upgraded to Business class!!!

A couple of years back, I had booked Emirates flight to Nairobi and then too, I was upgraded to the business class.

With a two hours stopover in Dubai, I did loiter the airport and revisited some old spots.. The airport was very calm compared to how busy it is in morning hours.

Very few passengers were around Starbucks…

Costa was almost empty too!

London flight was on-time . After enjoying Mumma’s khichadi which I got heated up in oven, it was very difficult to keep awake. But to cope up with the time difference and the local time of London, I had forced myself not to fall asleep. The flight otherwise was uneventful.

After first few days of business, I had a relatively relaxed time. One evening, Anilbhai took me to London Eye – the Millennium attraction of London.

Though I had experienced Singapore Flyer earlier, my excitement level was equally high.