Wacom Bamboo Create Pen and Touch Tablet Review

So I decided I HAD to buy something on Cyber Monday and I ended up buying the Bamboo Create Pen and Touch graphics tablet, even though it wasn’t really on a deal. Before buying it, I read a lot of reviews and saw a lot of videos of how it functions. It looked quite positive with some people even replacing their Intuos tablets with this one. I was hoping it was worth the buy, and I opened it up with a lot of excitement.
After the first few seconds of use, I could tell this tablet was quite awesome. The feeling was very realistic. The response time and the accuracy of the tablet was stunning and I did not expect that from it as it looked more like a ‘fun’ tablet than a serious one, by the look and marketing.

My experience with digital art is almost zero. I can do some graphic designing but none of it includes work on a tablet. Infact I’m so used to traditional graphite pencil that even using colored pencils for a drawing (still WIP as of this post) has been one of the most challenging works yet for me. I definitely was quite skeptical about the tablet’s performance reaching my expectations. But it really did, and surpassed. Within 24 hours of opening it, I’m already very comfortable using it. The touch functions are fun too, adding a Mac-like experience to Windows with the 2, 3 and 4 finger swipe functions, converting the tablet into a giant trackpad.
The pen is alright to hold, it took a while for me to get used to it. Noticed the 2 buttons on the pen and I love the fact that these buttons plus the 4 on the tablet can be programmed to almost any keystrokes and combinations, including opening applications. It’s pretty handy for some quick uses like undo, increase/decrease brush size, etc.

The accuracy like I mentioned before is quite brilliant. It’s the part that impressed me the most. Once I get used to the size of the pen, I’m sure I can write and draw as comfortably as doing it on paper and that shouldn’t be too far in the future.

The cable length is enough for my kind of usage and I don’t think I would need a wireless kit as of now. I just need to get used to one other thing. Adjusting myself to the angle of the tablet. While drawing with pencil on paper, I move around or move the paper around so I can draw some tricky lines at odd angles more comfortably. But on the tablet, if I try to change the angle, my lines go way off. I have to draw even the awkward lines keeping the tablet at the same angle and that’s something I need to get used to. As of now, my strokes aren’t very confident, so I end up drawing a bunch of small lines all connecting and overlapping each other.

The pen pressure sensitivity is pretty natural. I don’t usually press too hard while drawing on paper, so I’m kinda doing the same even on the tablet. Maybe I should adjust the pen firmness in the settings to see if it helps. The tablet does not detect pen tilt as far as I can see, but that’s ok because it has already given me more than I asked for.

Downside : The nib is definitely and visibly wearing out. It’s only been a day and I can see it clearly shorter than yesterday although I must admit I used it quite excessively in the last 24 hours. I’m hoping my habit of not applying too much pressure will save the nib a little while longer. I don’t wanna end up changing a nib every week. I heard of a protective cover that works well and preserves the nib. Should get that.
Apart from that, everything is brilliant and I’m very sure I’ve added another medium of art into my interest list. I’m only getting started but it’s already going very well. Hopefully I’ll post my first artwork on here very soon.

CM (why!) K ??

Being a graphic designer for a student organization is fun, but when you send your flyers for printing and find out they came out heavily saturated and dark, you get disappointed. My recent flyer had a nice blue shade in it (atleast on the screen), and in the final print, I almost couldn't distinguish it from black.. terrible! What I saw on the screen was the RGB version and what came out of the printer was a CMYK version. So what's causing this headache? Why can't CMYK bring up the same colors as the RGB version? I did some reading online and found that these two color profiles are complete opposites of each other. RGB adds color on a black background and CMYK absorbs color from a white background.

The lack of R,G and B colors gives black and mixing all RGB gives us white, but that's not the case with CMYK. If we mix C, M and Y, we don't really get black but a sort of grey and we need to add a fourth color K which represents black.

I still find all this quite difficult to comprehend. So while making my latest flyer, I made sure I worked on the CMYK file in Photoshop. The colors were not exact but close and I could manage. I obviously couldn't get the crisp bright colors that we would get with working in RGB. But I faced another problem with exporting the files.

Since I am not the person who would be taking the prints, I had to give the highest quality JPG files to the person responsible. On saving the CMYK file as a JPG, I noticed it appeared different in different image viewers. Here is an animated GIF of 3 cropped screenshots of the image viewed in Photoshop, Firefox, and Picasa.

The big question is, what will the file look like to the guy who is printing it? What if he uses Picasa Viewer to print the file? Would I get a print that is only CMY with no K ? What if he uses Firefox to print the file? Would it come out oversaturated and dark? Sounds like how my earlier RGB exported prints used to come out. What if he had some other kind of image viewer which would make this picture look even more different? I guess the truth will come out only after the first test print. It all depends on the kind of image viewer and the type of printer he's using. I am almost ready to bet whatever I'm seeing here will definitely not come out on the final print despite using the CMYK profile. The answer to these questions will come out in a couple of days.. and probably from then on, I can rectify/modify my exported files.

Dealing with the Heat!

Summer is well under way. In fact, it's been the hottest July I've ever experienced since 2010. It's annoying and uncomfortable but we just have to deal with it. Along with this discomfort, I've come to experience a new problem with heat. My laptop. It's a Dell Vostro 1320 that I bought in Feb 2010. After about a year of use, the battery got screwed up and I didn't really bother because I use it almost like a desktop that always sits on a table. I don't even use it on my lap or the bed.

Obviously, heat was a major issue. The table is pretty old and most of the polish is gone so it feels like the table is not really helping in letting the heat from the laptop escape. I used a plastic object to try and create a little more gap between the laptop and the table so that the heat would escape with ease. But it was a bit uncomfortable to use the laptop so I discarded that idea. I looked online and found that people use cooling pads under their laptops to keep them cool.

At this point (a couple of months ago) I really started wondering what temperatures I'm really dealing with here. I downloaded a couple of apps like CoreTemp and SpeedFan. They seemed to suggest that my laptop was definitely heating a lot. There were times when the temperature shot up to nearly 100C when the TJMax was listed as 105C. It was a bit scary. Only once ever did my laptop actually shut down due to over heating. And there was one time when my screen went crazy and I got the blue screen. I assumed that was because of the heat as the laptop felt like it was quite literally on fire. And all this happened with just playing some videos or doing some graphic design work. I haven't played any games in the last 2 years. I just didn't want to allow over heating and shut down issues to repeat. I had some more issues later. A lot of times, the display just went blank. The screen seemed to turn off. I later discovered that when viewed at a certain sharp angle, I could faintly see what was on the screen. This meant that the screen was still showing but the backlight was gone. I could manage to shut the laptop down safely and get the screen back up on restart. I had to do something to fix this problem!

I went back to looking at cooling pads and found a really cheap one for just 2 bucks. I almost considered it just an experiment without investing too much money. So by spending 4 bucks in total, I was getting a laptop cooling pad with 3 fans shipped home. I read some reviews that it was extremely flimsy and wasn't useful anywhere but a flat table. Some actually reported it to be broken at arrival. The day that I got mine, I was shocked to know that there's a laptop cooling pad inside the box that arrived. I wouldn't have been surprised to see just a piece of paper and nothing else. It was extremely light, weighing just a few grams with the packaging. When I opened the box, my worst fears came true. The pad was cracked. It wasn't in 2 pieces but definitely cracked. At this point I thought, it's not even worth sending back. I might as well, just try to tape it up and experiment with it. After all, it cost me only $4.

The pad was definitely the flimsiest i've ever seen. If I had to move it, I would do it extreme care. It felt like even the slightest excessive force would break it into 2. Despite the pad, I couldn't find really significant improvement in the heating issue. 3 fans were running at a pretty good speed under my laptop but they didn't seem to make much difference. I realized first thing, that I had to create some more gap between all the objects, laptop, pad and table. Once I had done that, I found a better improvement in the temperatures.

Before usage of the pad, my laptop with nothing running, just turned on was showing my 2 cores at temperatures between 55 and 65. With stuff running, it would quickly shoot up to the 80s and with a little more use, my system would become sluggish and show temps of nearly 100 and sometimes 101C.

Once I used the cooling pad effectively (with improved gaps), my laptop in idle state would show between 40 and 50C (some times 37C), and with stuff running anywhere between 60C and 80C depending on the load. And almost rarely it would enter the 90s. I noticed it would enter the 90s when my room as a whole isn't cool enough. My sad air conditioning struggles to keep my room at 30C. I feel it's quite a high room temperature to work and sleep in. In these conditions my laptop also shows the effect of a hot room. But in most cases, when I close all the programs putting the load on my processor, it quickly cools down to the 40s. That wouldn't happen earlier. So at least it shows upto a little extent that my $2 pad is actually working with some modifications and fixes.

Then I felt like experimenting more. So, being the Aerospace Engineer that I am, I did some crude some tests. I used an incense stick and placed it near the fans to see how the air was flowing and at what distance were the fans really effective. By looking at the smoke, blade design and the direction of rotation, I could tell that the pads were pushing air up onto the laptop. The smoke was so thin that it would just dissolve by the time it got accelerated before entering the fans. Not a really helpful test, but I'm sure the air in being blown on to the underside of the laptop. Despite my guess that the internal fan is sucking air into the laptop, I'm somehow more hopeful with the pad working in a reversed direction.

Instead of accumulating more volume of air between the pad and the laptop, I would prefer the pad continuously pushing air out toward the table which forces more air to come in between the pad and laptop. This way, there's a guarantee of fresh cool air coming in (even if the pad is pulling air that just came out of the bottom, the air would get cooled enough to be reused) and the internal fan doesn't have to work with stagnant warm air. I noticed that the air pushed out of the fan, comes out more at a very tight angle to the pad, and not much perpendicular to the fan. This means that it would be quite effective facing downwards. It would be pushing air out towards the table yet, not directly onto it.

I guess, I'm thinking too far. But those were some of my observations and guesses. So now I've reversed pad. Another mod to the already modded pad. Surprisingly, it's even more silent. (earlier I used to hear a slight noise when the room was silent). Now, I can't tell if the fans are running even in a silent room. And the cooling seems to have improved. I need to do this a little longer to see if this is really true. Time will tell if this idea worked and saved my laptop from roasting up.

Taking the Leap of Faith

I've begun exploring new techniques in graphite drawing. I never thought this specific type of art has so many different styles and techniques that one could use to create realistic effects. My latest craze has been blending with ear buds and "painting" with graphite powder. In the end I have realized there's very little usage of a pencil to actually "draw" something. Most of my drawings these days are requiring a higher usage of erasing, brushing and blending. It has resulted in a much smoother and nice finish on the drawings which give a more realistic feel to the whole drawing.

What's the point in drawing from a reference photograph just to make the drawing look like another photograph? I don't know. The sheer pleasure and the end result I guess. The fact that a human can make use of 'tools' and his eyes to recreate something on paper as exactly as possible, is something we have to appreciate. Nobody put a sensor or any kind of device in us to be able to read highlights, midtones and shadows and replicate them with our hands. It's all in the brain and eyes and we must be proud that we can tune our them to observe such details. I bow down to some of the artists' realistic sketches i've come across on deviantART which are detailed to unbelievable levels, down to the texture of the skin. It's something I still need to develop patience for, but I'm slowly getting there.

So here are some of my more recent creations. My friend gave me an orange colored paper and asked me to draw something feminine. I picture a scene on a desert with sunset orange lighting and a girl looking away into the distance. I found a reference that matched the picture I had, so I started off. I tried drawing with a charcoal pencil and it created a pretty interesting vector style effect with a good amount of contrast. I'm sure i'm going to do more of this kind of work.

Abstract Vector Girl charcoal drawing (reference internet) : 04-Oct-2011

After listening to tracks by the fresh and upcoming band VersaEmerge, I became a fan of Sierra Kusterbeck's singing style and her unique photographs. So i chose one such brilliant photograph to draw.

Drawing of Sierra Kusterbeck of VersaEmerge : 14-Nov-2011

 My attention then turned to the Internet's favorite model Susan Coffey. I've seen hundreds of drawings of hers, and I felt kind of left out. I wanted to be in that league that was lucky enough to live in the same era as Susan Coffey and have the pleasure of drawing the fine features that she possesses. This was my first drawing in 2012 and I used quite a lot of eraser and blending tools like ear buds to get the image I wanted. Still haven't perfected that technique though. More Susan Coffey drawings to come for sure. One can hardly suffice with a single work!

Susan Coffey drawing: 15-Feb-2012

My next project come in a sudden dreamy flash sequence. Here I was, an Aerospace Engineering - with lofty dreams - drawing pictures of models on the internet. No. I had to draw something that was related to what I was planning to pursue. And the picture popped in my head like how a blub suddenly glows over the head of a cartoon character. I saw a rocket taking of in the distance and the hand of a passionate watcher pumping his fist in excitement. I saw it more like a photograph, with a distinct depth of field. I sat down to draw that next. Here's when I found out this new style of "painting" with graphite powder. I took a nice dark 9B pencil and used it on a sandpaper to get graphite powder. It wasn't the finest but it did the job. Almost the entire drawing was quite literally painted. It wasn't very easy but I tried my best. I hope to be able to create more of such original art inspired by my life's progress.

The Hand that Launched a Dream : 10-March-2012

More of my works are featured at my deviantART page.

Rediscovering the Music Scene

Undoubtedly I love music. It's a kind of love that's different from what most people think. Almost everyone on Earth says they love music. Really, who doesn't?

Well I love it too, and like I said it's kind of different. For me it's more about actually playing music and composing it. Being a guitarist and having a bit of ear for scales, I find it quite easy to create new tunes. Recording them and building and improvising is another whole story which I somehow do not find time for. After picking up the guitar and getting really absorbed into Rock music, I started treating other genres with contempt. I felt that rock music was more about the process of inspiration, songwriting, composing, producing and having most importantly, the skill to create the individual pieces that make the song. Somehow it wasn't that interesting with Electronic music. The use of effects and buttons to create music wasn't very appealing to me. I felt that kind of "too easy". And I did demonstrate that to my friends.

It would take about a minute to create a drum and bass sequence and another couple of minutes to overlay a set of chords and a small tune on top (I still use some non-electronic terms with the lack of knowledge). From there, it was about adding some effects and controlling the individual instruments to create a 2-3 min demo track. Of course producing the track to it's final version would take a while but the actual process of creation didn't need too much effort. It definitely takes much longer for me even to create a 1-2 min long rock track.

But somehow, my view about music started changing. If it was more to do with crowd interaction rather than just self-satisfaction, then the other genres of music still manage to pull crazy numbers of people. I have friends who had been to the Ultra Music Festival in Florida and it's just crazy how many people turn up to dance to a 4/4 sequence with a bass line and progressing layers of instruments and vocals over it.

I still stuck to my roots of rock music and continued playing guitar live on stage at small events. But recently in Feb, I had people asking me to "DJ" for an event we had on-campus. "DJ"ing? That was an idea I didn't really like, being a traditional musician but since I already had an idea about terms like BPM and "beatmatching" (I never used the term beatmatching until recently) and phrasing of music, I decided to give it a shot. I was supposed to play only Bollywood dance music for the event and that was kind of tough because it was not just a new genre but a new playlist itself. I was asked to "play good songs". But what were good songs? I had no playlist, I had no idea what music to play.

But some help from friends, I made a short playlist to last me a couple of hours at the least. The next most important thing was getting some kind of controller to mix the music (yeah, I was in that bad a situation). I had never used any kind of DJ controller before this. With no time to research and not much money to spend, I decided to get a basic Midi Controller to do the mixing. I had a couple of days to practice with the controller and get to know the songs. I couldn't do much and turned up for the "gig" under prepared and low on confidence. I created some mappings on my keyboard so I could mix my songs up without sounding too bad. The "sync" option on software proved to be quite helpful for automatic beatmatching. Since, I already knew about waveforms and equalizers, I had no trouble giving smooth transitions between songs. And for songs where BPMs were too far apart, I used some backspin effects or timed drops (couple of more terms I didn't know what to call before I knew them) to change the music. I had a friend stand next to me who was helping me out with the progression of the tracklist. I had no idea what song to play next. But it worked out pretty well by the end of the night. I could tell from the faces and reactions, my first "gig" went well. Armed with nothing but a laptop and controller that would fit in my bag, I mixed music live for a small crowd.

Now that, I had done it without much knowledge, I actually started researching about the so-called "Electronic Dance Music" (EDM) scene. More than popular radio dance hits , I was attracted to house music. I didn't know the difference until very very recently, like a month ago.

I still know nothing much about this genre. I rarely heard tracks from Armin van Burren and the big list of European electronic artists/DJs/producers. I have heard about people getting offended when one can't distinguish between DJs and producers and whatever else they like to be called. Why can't we all be called musicians? You might twist knobs and press buttons and I might be palm muting and stomping away on the expression pedal, but we are all making/playing music. I used to laugh at that guy wearing the oversized head of a dead mouse and laugh more when my friends corrected me it was a mau5 head. I had no idea that those 140 bpm tracks that sound like they are playing at 70 bpm were called dubstep. Who knew people love this music so much? Where did Metallica, Iron Maiden, Alter Bridge, Joe Satriani, and the good old Pink Floyd go?

I am stuck in a pretty strange conflict right now. I don't know if other musicians have gone through this, but I can definitely feel it. I still love traditional music, but right now, EDM is kind of obsessive. I can't help but play around with the controller that I have and keep trying to learn new stuff with the controls.

I'm still discovering new artists and finding out about new sub-genres under the Electronic umbrella. Some of those progressive house tracks are so minimalistic and brilliant mood setters, I'm starting to appreciate this genre finally. But as I'm going deeper into this genre, I'm finding conflicts within lovers of the same kind of music. The countless debates between "real and fake" DJs. I don't really see the point and I don't even have enough knowledge to comment on this. But I've seen people dancing as enthusiastically as they would in any good club, even if the "DJ" was me using just a laptop and a basic midi controller. Even something as simple as a crossfade between two songs with the equalizer knobs had people dancing away with renewed excitement when they find the track changed! It's all about the situation and the crowd.

Yeah, maybe people would appreciate your talents if you had used vinyls and did manual beatmatching by ear and used some good scratching techniques. But when they are out there on the floor, most of the times, they cannot even see what you're equipment you're using and most people wouldn't even know the difference between vinyls and a midi controller. They would just see a big bunch of knobs and faders everywhere. Now when it comes to the quality of the music, there's a definite downside with compressed MP3 files. And again there's the upside of fitting all your equipment in a backpack and going out to "gig" and most importantly being able to afford to actually do it.

That being said, I find the art of beatmatching by ear quite intriguing. I noticed I was getting too used to the sync function on DJ software but I'm starting to find that a bit too automatic, a bit too boring. It's kind of a weird feeling to let the software do everything. You don't even have to press the play button at the right time, it will still sync your beats. Hmm. I need something more than that if I want to get a rush out of this genre of music. I can't just stand there and pretend like I'm doing cool stuff when all I'm doing is pressing the play button and using the equalizers and effects. And the techniques of scratching (I didn't know they had names until recently again, like babies, chirps, crabs, etc) also look interesting. From what I've seen, that needs a little skill and hand-hand coordination as well. While I can play a guitar with eyes closed, I definitely cannot scratch! Random motion of the touchwheel might still sound cool sometimes, but it's just too random to be called scratching.

At another recent "gig" where there were Punjabi families dancing to bhangra, I noticed a 5 year old kid whose eyes were gleaming at the sight of all the flashing LEDs and all the buttons. (Yeah, I kind of mapped my controller's LEDs to do a lot of flashy stuff). Since it wasn't really critical for me to nail every note bang on, I asked the kid to just play with the inactive deck's jogwheel up and down while I was cutting with the crossfader. Since my crossfader cutting was timed, it sounded pretty good and people had noticed. A KID was scratching! DJ 5-year-old-Kid-in-the-golf-club-bar is going to be his name.

So yeah, despite having all the auto stuff, I'm trying to create a challenge for myself. Is it hard to beatmatch manually? Definitely yes! The last few days, I've been trying to beatmatch without looking at the waveforms or the BPM indicators. Setting a cue point and manually matching it, all just by ear. It's kind of tough to concentrate on the two tracks separately. Sometimes we want them playing together, sometimes isolated. It becomes particularly challenging when the two tracks are very close and separated by a couple of decimal points. They eventually go out of sync but stay on for quite a while to fool you into thinking you matched them. We can probably still fix that by just pushing or pulling the track just a little bit to bring the beats back on. I'm thinking each person has a different way to find his quickest method of beatmatching. I've sometimes taken a few seconds (probably got lucky) and sometimes over 3-4 minutes. I still need to discover a kind of pattern that I like to follow.

Anyway, so that's the rant about me rediscovering the Music scene. One thing I've learned is to not stereotype any kind of music. When you enjoy something, just play/listen/compose/produce it. And while you enjoy that, it doesn't mean that the other genres or other "ways of learning" are tasteless or "fake". It's always good to take a diplomatic stance and look at the pros and cons of all the options. People will do what they find convenient financially and technically. By the way, I might have sounded a bit harsh in my previous post about photography. It's almost a similar situation with everything going Digital and auto, the actual art of photography is slowly disappearing except for those few people who still love doing things the traditional way. So maybe I need to take a more diplomatic stand in that too. Maybe..

Anyway, as a closing word, for any musician/dj/producer/whatever, the universal rule still applies, practice always makes perfect.

P.S : I was listening to an Alt Metal/Hard Rock/Post-Grunge playlist (Alter Bridge, Breaking Benjamin, Creed, Audioslave, Theory of a Deadman, Chevelle, Daughtry, Hinder, Saving Abel, My Darkest Days, Seether, Shinedown, etc.......) while typing this out.

2012 is Here!

First of all, Happy New Year!

My posts these days are almost always very late, but thankfully I'm still managing to keep the blog alive although it seems a bit pointless unless I post something useful. Atleast my 2012 started with a bang. After a lot of canceled plans to go out for various breaks, my friends and I finally managed to make one plan work. The idea was to get out of the super cold Wichita at any cost and celebrate the New Year in a nicer, warmer more active place. So off we went on 29th December down south.

29th Dec : We drove through Oklahoma City, Dallas and Houston to get to Galveston Island on the eastern coast of Texas looking at Gulf of Mexico which was a drive of about 12 hours including a few stops on the way. We planned to stay around Galveston and Houston for the next 3 days. Reached Galveston around midnight and headed straight to Denny's on the Beach Road to grab a quite bite. The drive finally took its toll on us and slept like logs.

30th Dec : We roamed around Galveston Island a bit and headed for the Schlitterbahn Waterpark. Most of the outdoor rides were closed and they had a pretty large heated indoor section. It was quite some fun and we didn't realize we spent almost the entire day at the waterpark. When we got out, our stomachs were aching for food and we headed straight for Houston (about an hour long drive) and got to an Indian restaurant. Not great ambiance and above average food but highly overpriced. Frankly speaking, I kinda got tired of Indian restaurants because they all just taste the same. We then headed to the Galleria Mall in Houston. It was a pretty huge mall just as my friends said it would be. After hanging out a bit and looking down an atrium that had a 4 storey tall Christmas tree with people skating around it on a rink, we decided we were tired enough to get back to our room. Another 1 hour drive later we crashed on our beds.

31st Dec : We tried waking up early to look around Galveston. This day was supposed to be a more lazy and less tiring day. We also wanted to hit the beach though we couldn't decide which one. First we headed to a historic street called the Strand. We walked around and noticed an abnormally large population of old people. Is this a place people come to after retirement? Maybe. Not sure. The whole city had this very laid back and relaxed feel. Nobody was in a hurry and everyone was under the speed limits. With lots of people walking around on the streets in the pleasant warmth of the sun, it felt quite good. We entered a few stores and checked out the local sales. After eating at a Mediterranean Cafe, we decided to take a ferry ride across the sea to Bolivar Peninsula. It's a free ride that is sponsored by the Government. We got to the other side in about half an hour or so and resumed driving down the road. Something about the whole place felt very unlike the "midwest" experience in USA we had so far. It felt more European although I've never been to any place in Europe. We noticed fog was picking up. We found a beach called Crystal Beach, a few miles down and decided to drive in. By now the fog was quite thick. We couldn't see very far out in to sea. We drove around on the sand and played some frisbee. After a while the fog got really thick and we could only make out headlamps of cars traveling up and down the paths that were created in the sand. We thought it was time to leave and brought the car a little close to the water so we could get in the car without letting dry sand sticking to our legs. But by the time we all got in, the car started sinking in the sand. We got out and noticed the front wheels 6-8 inches inside the sand. That was quick! No wonder it's called quick sand. Thankfully some locals who were driving by noticed and they "happened" to have ropes to tug. Apparently almost everyone on the island drive wide-wheeled trucks and carry this kind of gear on the trunk. Not surprising.

So after some effort we managed to pull the car out. We were really thankful to those locals or we would have been stuck in a very bad situation with the fog and cold on the less populated island. We could surely call it a day and silently headed back to Galveston. It was already quite dark and we decided to chuck going to Houston and spend the last few minutes of the 2011 in Galveston. We went back to the Strand and found a couple of night clubs. We chose one that looked pretty good from the outside, I think it was The Lounge. On the lower floor it had a few private party rooms each with DJs blasting away and on top was the main club were we went. Once in, we got some drinks flowing and the party was on. The DJ was playing some pretty popular hits and thankfully unlike the rest of Galveston, the crowd seemed younger. Some dancing and drinking soon brought us to Midnight. 

1st Jan, 2012 : When the clock stuck 0:00, we jumped like crazy kids and celebrated. Maybe the fact that we were on an island in Texas, inside an unknown club surrounded by unknown people, really brought our excitement out. Some simple things like these just change your perspective about life itself. The drinks helped, of course. We even had complementary New Year shots. We danced away for a while after that and didn't let that excitement wear out even after getting out of the club. Some of us suddenly wanted to walk down the beach road at 2 am. So off we went. We walked down singing our hearts away, dancing, swaying, whatever you could call it. Everything just felt so good. A moment that I would want to forget ever. Thanks to a blog like this, the memories will be recorded for good. We weren't really in a mood to eat so we headed back to the motel. Houston's Johnson Space Center was on the waiting list in a few hours.

We woke up pretty comfortably and bade a final goodbye to Galveston. I never imagined a small laid back place like that would give us such an amazing time and great memories. Once in Houston, we headed straight to JSC. It was really a dream come true for an Aerospace enthusiast and student like me. Johnson Space Center is the place from which the space missions are handled. We checked out the control rooms and exhibits spread out. There was a model control on display for us to experience how missions happening thousands of miles away in space are controlled. Reminded me of that famous dialogue from the movie Apollo 13 - "Houston, we have a problem". Wow, to imagine those guys who desperately worked their butts off here in Houston while the crew of Apollo 13 were on the verge of death, just brought goosebumps on my skin. Some feats and achievements we humans have managed truly blow me away. It was the first time I had seen a full Saturn V rocket. Another mindblowing sight. It was laid out horizontally inside a long rectangular building. The stages were separated so that people could walk in between and check out front and back ends of each stage. The nozzles were just unfathomably huge. There were 5 of those mega-nozzles on that first stage. When we reached the front end of Saturn V, we could finally see the tiny brownish red capsule that was home for 3 astronauts during the final minutes of splash down. Oh, what irony. A 35-storey vehicle leaves Earth's atmosphere only to return back as a tiny capsule. Moving on, we checked out the simulators and training equipment the astronauts use to get a grip on how it might be out there in the nothingness of space. Some food and more sightseeing later, we were done. It was evening and we had to get moving. Visiting Johnson Space Center definitely goes down as one of the best and inspiring experiences in my life.

We then traveled to the south side of Houston to a massive Hindu temple built in a style similar to Akshardham in Delhi. It was quite a brilliant piece of architecture so far away from the homeland of the Hindus. We took some amazing photographs here to keep our memories alive forever.

It started getting dark and we quickly got some dinner at a "Paradise Biryani Pointe", not quite close to the Hyderabadi Paradise Biryani but good enough for an authentic Indian restaurant located on the other side of the world. And then started the long drive back home. Surprisingly we were covering the distance quite well.

2nd Jan, 2012 : We were finally back home after such an amazing trip and New Year Celebration. It was a dreamlike 4 days spent on the beach and in a great city. Now were in Wichita. Aw, hell. What are we supposed to do here now? Well, just along with it, Wichita ain't that bad after all. Let's look forward to a hopefully nice year!