Stone-age fishermen

What we found out yesterday: mints (mentos/polo) are very poor baits for fishing. Not because fishes don't like mint, on the contrary they seem to like mint, but because mints are too big for the fishes' mouths. All they can do is nibble.

The story:

Kela, Yusuf, the wife, and myself were walking around the willowtree lake yesterday, and encouraged by the large numbers of fishes, we decided to try our hand at catching some. Armed with a piece of dead branch, some thin rope-like plant stems, and some mints (the only edible item we had on us at that time), we put our fishing talents to the test. The plan was to pull out the fishing line as soon as any of the fishes took a bite at the mint. Flock to the mint they did, but alas, none could bite and hold on to the mint.

Frustrated by our failures, kela and I resorted to throwing mint pieces into the water to attract the fishes and then spearing down on them with the dead branch. I swear I almost hit one fish. Maybe there is an injured fis limping somewhere in the lake right now.

I'm sure if our lived depended on it, we could have figured out a way to catch some fishes, even with the extremely limited resources tht we had on hand.

Apple (cont.)

Turned out to be a disappointment. Nothing new was unveiled.
Oh well ...

Apple

There's a lot of speculation about what Apple (Steve Jobs) will unveil today at the WWDC. Possibly new iPhone and Leopard features with maybe some new devices. More on this later.

Wanted: Summer pics

It's time I ventred out with the camera and captured some fresh images of the full-fledged summer. Maybe in a couple of days.

Ultimate Frisbee

After a long long time, I played ultimate frisbee yesterday. I was half expecting my stamina to be dramatically improved (thanks to my half marathon training). But I was jolted back to reality when I was gasping for air within the first five minutes of the game. It turns out that stamina with slow steady running doesn't help you much when it comes to alternating fas sprints and stops. Hopefully, I'll get a lot better at it before the end of the summer.

For those who haven't played ultimate frisbee, it's a very enjoyable sport. Definitely worth a try.

Shrek 3

Funny jokes, but boring for the most part. I wasn't particularly impressed.

Wikimapia

An interesting website:

http://www.wikimapia.org/

The site is based on google maps, and lets users add places of interest and some explanations.

Zoom into any place you like and you can look at user-tagged places and explanations. You can also add your own places (see top left) and once a few people vote that your place is genuine and useful, it is made permanent.

I spent a good couple of hours exploring areas around my primary and secondary schools, some of the places we used to hang out (Linking road, 4 bunglows, Bhavan's campus). I also found some comments from people I know (Many of my neighbors had marked our society as their territory :) ).

p.s. The site is on the slower side, it takes a few seconds to load all the places, every time you zoom or pan.

Courage

Remembered a quote:

Courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes courage is that little voice at the end of the day that says: "I'll try again tomorrow."

Road to recovery

Still recovering from the Half marathon from yesterday. I promise to post pics of the run soon.

Meanwhile, here are some pics(taken by action sports images) from my traverse city run.
(I didn't realize you were supposed to smile at the finish line :)), but you can tell that Yusuf knew )

http://www.backprint.com/go.asp?20511374

Race weekend

Finally, race weekend is here. I'm excited about the race, but I'm equally excited about getting done with the run and finally being able to do other stuff on weekdays. :))

It's also unusually warm here the last 3-4 days. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow.
It's going to be fun. We also have the AA food festival with half off for runners tomorrow!