Met Ankit's Dad and we talked for fifteen minutes. He works for the Indian government's power generation. He said India has only trace amounts of power coming from nuclear plants. Most of it comes from hydro-, coal-, and gas-powered electricity plants. As of a new nuclear pact with the United States, more nuclear power plants should begin coming online in 4-5 years. He says he can't believe or understand how the United States can have a recession. After trying to explain what I knew about it, I concluded with "No matter how much money you have, you can borrow more than you have and get into debt."
My apartment complex has a swimming pool and gym, but I need a membership badge to use them. For the badge, I needed a passport style photo.
To save a hundred rupees or so, I wanted to take the photo myself. Our rooms had light-yellow paint, which would serve as a light-colored background. I used a a couple chairs stacked on top of one-another, scissors, a ruler, a gorilla pod, and a Canon digital camera.
First, I tried to take the picture with the natural light available in the room. My camera didn't turn on the flash by default.
Next, tried it with natural light from the sun coming through the window.
Finally, I manually forced the flash, enabled the "Hi Auto ISO" setting, and tried it again (I closed the curtains to keep out the sunlight). This got better lighting, but the quality of the photo wasn't as good. My face looked oily.
I compared these to my Passport picture scan. The "best" overal picture was probably the second one. It seemed better than my passport photo:
Cropping the photo required solving for an unknown - how large should I make it?
My plan was to take measurements of my passport photo, which had been taken by a "professional" at the US Post Office.
On this US passport photo, the width is 3.5cm: 1 cm of white space on the sides of my head, and 2.5cm ear-to-ear. The length is 4.5cm: 3.25cm from my chin to the top of my hair, and from my chin to the bottom of the photo, there is about 1.2cm (some small whitespace on top, too).
I used these measurements to resize my new photo in Photoshop. First, I cropped out some excess background, retaining a width-to-length ratio of 3:4 (Select an area, then Alt + I to crop). Then, I used Image Resize to resize it to be 3 inches wide (Image -> Image Size -> Document Size, or Alt + Ctrl + I).
Here, I inspected the needed dimensions by using the Info tab (Windows -> Info, or F8) and the View Rulers option (View -> Rulers, or Ctrl + R). I was in inches mode, so I set Photoshop to use centimeters (Edit -> Preferences -> Units and Rulers -> Rulers: cm ). Note that Photoshop also reveals printing dimensions with File -> Print with Preview.
From here, I could see that the photo was too small. My chin-to-top-of-head height was too large - 4cm. Dividing 3.25 into 4 implied that I could resize this image to 80% of its current size. I did that. This yielded a chin-to-of-head length of 3.23cm. The 0.02cm difference from my passport photo could be due to my hair being shorter in this photo.
As a way to check my result, I checked my ear-to-ear width (which, as indicated above, should be 2.5cm) and this was 2.47cm, which was close enough. The photo was now sized and proportioned appropriately. Of course, after printing it, I would cut off excess space with scissors or a slicer. The important thing was that my face was sized appropriately.
In cm, the final image was 6.096cm by 6.913cm. I saved the final result as a JPG image with 100% quality; the size was 160KB. I put copies of it on a USB drive, and in my inbox.
This took me 2 hours.
Next, I needed to print a few copies of this photo.
Ankit advised me on two places where I could go to get printed photos - one was "GK Vale", the other was a "Kodak" place. I went to GK Vale, which made this process easy. They accepted my USB drive, and I asked for a 4x6 print out (apparently India uses American inches for photographs). The cost was Rs 5 - very cheap. I asked for two copies.
When I picked up my photo, the size of my head was much, much bigger than what I had anticipated, and it took up the entire photo; my chin-to-top-of-head length was 8 cm. The final image was 15.24cm by 17.29cm. How could I have made this mistake? I immediately was mad at the vendor. I agreed to come back in the next day.
However, when I went home to recheck my file, I discovered that indeed I had used a photo that was much larger than what I needed. So, it was my fault. I had no idea how I had made this mistake.
I reworked it in Photoshop so that the final size of the photo was precisely 4 by 6 inches. After shrinking the photo, this left a lot of free space. I used this free space to make six copies of the photo on the same photo print out. This would eventually yield six copies of my photo on a single 4 by 6 printout.
More Exploring
My journey to GK Vale included many stops.
I found a coffee shop called "Coffee Day" that resembled a modern coffee shop, only it was a sit-down place with a menu. There were many well-to-do Indians and foreigners there. There's no jumbo menu for take out - you have to sit down and take a menu.
I found a Spa and Beauty Salon. A one hour Deep Tissue Massage is $20 USD, compared to the $75 that one normally finds in the United States, and which I used to pay with Melanie Waite in Redlands.
I found a Nike store, an Addidas store, a Van Heusen store, several appliance stores and electronics stores, a book store with 90% English books (and 10% in some other language I didn't understand - not Hindi, Telegu, nor Kanada), and a Mormon Mission for the Church of Latter Day Saints. Following a recommendation from Melanie Waite, I went into the Mormon mission and met an "elder" named Castano, who was one year into his two-year mission trip. Castano was originally from Orange Country, California. I found a nice all-purpose store called MK Retail. This place sold voltage converters, and I will probably return at a later date to purchase one for my electric shaver.
I found a grocery store called Foodworld, and unlike many other stores, this place had a supply of Broccoli, and some imported oranges. I had been struggling to find a source of Vitamin C. Foodworld became my new standard grocery store.
I finally got home and noticed that we were running low on drinking water. We get large bottles of drinking water delivered from the local convenience store. I went to the market in our complex, but it was not open. Daily hours in India are called "Timings", and the timings of the in-complex market are 7:30am to 8:30pm.
When I got home, I was able to prepare my broccoli without much effort. My cauliflower, however, had a caterpillar in it, and some random slimy things, and it was browning. I should inspect what I buy more, and I shouldn't have been shopping so late in the day.
At the "Total" market, they have huge barrel-size bins of rice where you can buy it by the kg. I saw women there scooping rice into their hand and staring at the rice for several moments. I asked one of them what they were looking for, but she didn't understand me. What are they looking for?
Rush hour is at seven at night. Traffic is very bad; cars will line up at an intersection for 300m at a time. The traffic signals do not successfully create breaks in traffic.
Walking at night feels dangerous. There is no lighting on the sidewalk brickpaths, so the only light is from the shops and cars. There are lights on the road, but they are not lit. According to WikiTravel, it generally okay to walk in the early evening, but I don't feel comfortabe doing this yet. Besides, dusk is when the mosquitoes come out.
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