Rajesh Prabhu Blogs!

It was early morning ( at chennai airport and was waiting for my transit to Madurai after almost 20 hours of travel from Chicago via Frankfurt (8/28)).  For relaxation, just turned my attention to the TV to spend time. That was when I realized that the channel that was running was “Gyan darshan” where one of the professor was explaining some mathematical forumulas ( I was not even sure what subject was that). I was expecting some news channel and that is what is atleast useful for travellers. Not sure who have given this wonderful idea to put this channel in airport. I am not against that channel since it it a wonderful channel for students; however its the worst channel that you can put in an airport.

Atlast, we (poor US residents from India,  who cannot survive anymore without GPS directions), are saved by Garmin. They have the Indian maps supported for all Garmin versions that you may own now.

Still limited coverage (refer the map), but a great start. Already 70 major cities including Chennai are covered in the current version and most of the other urban areas are attempted to be covered. This should be more than enough to travel on indian roads. I am eager to try out and let you all know once I am done.

Its almost crossed a year since I moved from Alabama and now its time for my next move to Wisconsin. Gearing up to experience the bitter cold weather. Heard it is a nice place though in summer. Moving again from EST to CST.

Temperature comparison between Appleton and Hartford… not bad though!!!

First week of November, am moving to NorthEastern part of US from AL. 1200 miles of journey, moving from CST to EST..mm.. It has been more than a year at Montgomery and I will definetely miss the southern way of living. Let me see what does the northeast US provide me with… Getting ready for a snowy winter

Last weekend we went to chattanooga, a city in TN. It was a wonderful city which is sorrounded  by Lookout mountains.

The first place we went was Ruby falls, which is a wonderful falls which is 1200 ft below the ground, inside caves. This is a must-see location. You will be taken in a elevator 1000 ft down and then walk for half an hour inside stone cave and then reach this falls. See the video below urself. Just remember that there is absolutely no sunlight inside this cave!! No one knows where this waterfall originates.

Next was the Incline railway which is a 1 mile steep train climb in Lookout mountain. Something similar to our Palani ropecar. Hence not that much interesting. The final one was the Rock city. This is a nice location to visit from where we can see 7 states of south east US.   

Overall very worthy for a 1 day visit

 VS all FM Transmitters like 

For all those cars without an MP3 player and just with a FM radio, it was a hard time to listen to favorite MP3 music. To add to this  problem, there is no way to introduce an external auxillary since most models are factory preset. This was the problem I faced too.

Hence I decided to buy a FM transmitter which get input from an IPod and then broadcast in the FM transmission frequency that I set so that I can tune my car radio to this particular FM frequency. Ever since I started to think of which product to buy, mostly I saw complaints and concerns about the quality of audio that a FM transmitter can give. Many from Metro areas had comments that it was very hard to find a free FM frequency for them to tune it. Also in car movement sometimes the frequency gets jammed with some other local interference thus creating squeaky noises from speaker at times.

Then, I found this Sony cassette Adapter. Fortunately in my corolla I had a tape with the audio system. This cassette adapter has a auxillary input pin which you can plug in to your IPod (literally any audio device) and just insert this cassette in to the audio system as you would do for any other cassette and home audio system. Voila!!! The sound quality was great and I am now able to enjoy hours of my mp3 music from IPod without any interference during travel. This is much much cheaper than the FM transmitter and also does not require any batteries or power like FM transmitters.

I would recommend going for a cassette adapter if the car does have a tape ; else there is no other way than FM transmitter

It was a nice break after I came to US. In fact we dont commonly have a concept of vacation in India. Even in long weekends, I just go to my native Madurai. One of the Good things that I picked up from US is vacations and the first vacation itself was a great location. Why I choose orlando, Florida was a different story. My wife submitted a research paper to IJCNN  as part of her Ph.D., program and was due to attend and present the paper in an international Conference. Hence orlando

Amidst her tight schedules to Conference, we found time to go to these great places. Aashirwad restaurant @ I-Drive gave us superb buffet everyday at $8.00

I should say thanks to Mircosoft Streets and Trips for guiding me alot. You can view some of our photos taken at Orlando here

Fireworks @ Magic kingdom

Magic kingdom night parade

See more in the below links…
Magic Kingdom Carousel of Progress show
Daytona beach
Universal Studios Hollywood: Earthquake studio tour
Jaws – Universal Studios, Orlando

With due respect to my vacation @ orlando, I may not spend time blogging… atleast till this weekend…

We went to the temple at Atlanta last week. This is one of the biggest in the southern part. Good place
where there is seperate temples for Shiva and Balaji. Below is the photo I took with my neighbourhood family in the temple.

 From Left: Myself, Aniruddan, Vasan, Ananthi with kid Atheenthran and Harisankar.

  This is the bird’s eye view of the temple, courtesy maps.live.com

Which one has better zoom and clarity? Look for yourself. I have given the same address in both google maps and microsoft live maps.

Google Maps             Vs.    Microsoft live maps

  Vs  

Microsoft live search Bird’s eye view look crystal clear and can zoom more than google maps.

Update on 7/26: See a british airways flight in this live maps link here. See the niagara much closer here.