The wife arrived here, late on the 21st of August, and I’d been thinking of taking her to the Lake Roxen ever since. Yesterday, the weather wasn’t too warm, but it was bright enough. She hadn’t ridden a bike in several years, and was concerned about gears as she’d never ridden a bike with gears, but I told her that the day’s ride was the perfect opportunity to get used to them, so off we went!

I joined lj in January of 2007, after what’s now refered to in our circles as the great LJ exodus; many had left, but many were still around. Even back then, it seemed clunkier than blogger, but the community was certainly more thriving. Over the years, I’ve blogged on and off, and had even been thinking about moving to my own server and domain for a while, but that hadn’t quite taken off, until recently. I started blogging at pchengi.com earlier this month, and was looking for means to migrate my lj posts there, and setup an automated crossposting system. I came across ljcharm , which I used, for both backing up my posts, and setting up a cross-posting system. I will no longer write posts here directly, but my posts will continue to get crossposted here. I’d like to have your comments directly on my new blog, but if you feel more comfortable writing here, that’ll be fine too. Thanks for all the love and affection you’ve shown me, and I hope to continue to enjoy that in the days and years to come.

‘A lot could happen over a cup of coffee’ goes the slogan of a coffee house in India, and I guess it did :) After years of being subject to nagging from my parents, I decided to get married. Now since I hadn’t been successful in falling in love with anyone and convincing her to marry me, I had to fall back upon the dreaded “arranged marriage”!

Arranged marriage, in India, is for the most part like fishing in or getting fished in, a gold-fish bowl;

Today, I learned that I have a condition known as Chromostereopsis; it’s a visual illusion where depth is perceived in two-dimentional images/text when presented in certain color combinations. When my friend Aravind Sundaresh uploaded a picture of his culinary creation (akki rotti/rice cake) with red chutney, it triggered my chromatic aberration; to me, the lump of red powder appears to have depth, and seems to leap out of the screen, like in a 3D image. The dark background of the table, and the contrast with the white plate seems to be enough to bring about this effect for me. While I’ve observed this phenomenon in the past, I hadn’t ever researched it, but when I casually mentioned this to my friend Deepa, she was immediately intrigued, looked it up, and told me what it was. This is certainly something to be filed under #todayIlearned.