Now that things have settled down, I have submitted an FE report for the project. I hope that would be satisfactory. Between I made the complete report while sitting on the train. The train from chennai to ernakulam is approx 12 hours and i had an RAC ticket, no berth. So I took out the laptop and started making the report- thanks to my asus eee pc that lasts 8 hours. I finished the report in 5 hours though and crashed in whatever little space that i had to sit.
So back to the cycling stuff- Some updates. Kodak people seems to have bunked. The lady that I talked to seems to have liked the idea when i spoke to her over the phone and send her the relevant details via mail. After that we were supposed to talk more details over the phone and she seems to have disappeared. No replies to mail, and no one picks up the phone. Realizing that we are not getting camera spons and that we are getting close to the starting date, I went to ritchie on saturday to buy the camera only to find that the model that i wanted - Kodak playsport is not available. I found one shop and finally managed to convince the guy to ship me the camera on monday ie today(Paid him the full amount in advance).No.... things does not work out that easily. Due to heavy rains in chennai all shops are closed today.. ohh now what? Now mister Sanjay R Menon the guy who recently got placed in Credit Suisse ( I hope I got the spelling correct) has agreed to go and personally collect the camera for the shop tomorrow and get it to ernakulam by 9th.( btw we are starting on 10th). I hope our savior mister Sanjay can make it.Pray our hero can deliver ..
Thats about the camera, now lets talk about the T-shirt. The story of the T-shirt. Here I go.The T-shirt was designed on a website called ilogo.in loooong time back, much before my endsems started. Once the endsems started I completely forgot about it and realized that "ohh ****, I need to get the t-shirts printed." Called up ilogo.in and asked the guy how many days can he deliver within. I realized T-shirts cant be made and delivered to your doorstep from Bombay in 5 days time.Switch to backup plan."ohh ****, where is the backup plan??" :P .Enter our savior number 2- Mister Renjith P Ravindran. He is getting the T-shirts printed locally.We are expecting the T-shirts by 8th. Check out the T-shirt design at the picture gallery.
Now what, ya the cycles- now this is a long story. I will make it short. TI cycles had agreed to sponsor us from the very beginning. They still are. We wanted Hercules act 110 plus. They agreed but since the cycle is not available in stock we were asked to suggest something else.Unfortunately non of the cycles that we want,(which are performance cycles by the way ) are not available in 2 numbers from any dealer.Right now we have decided that cycles need not be identical.One of the cycles is confirmed- Hercules act 105. There are giving us the cycles tomorrow, will know what cycle will be the second one. Hope some good cycle is available.
THE GPS story- I got a gps data logger unit from ebay. I literally went mad trying to interface that to my Linux comp. Spend about 24 working hours on that device and I am still yet to get it working on my linux lappy, that i will be taking along with me for the trip. I think its working on my windows comp, but it seems to be giving me some arbitrary reading. I dunno :P Lets hope i get it working properly before 10th. The cloudy chennai prevented me from testing it as well, no gps satellites visible...
So finally whats the status?? Yes whatever happens , whether we get the camera or not, whether we get the gps working or not, whether we get the t-shirts or not ( definitely only after we get the cycles) we are leaving for the 1000 km adventure on Dec 10th friday early morning.We are heading south, heading for the capital which we expect to reach in 3-4 days time.The attempt is to get there in 3 days time.. This will be a gauge based on which we can judge how much we can cover everyday :P . Day 1 stay at Maraikulam, Day 2 stay at some place at Kollam, if we cover 100km on day 2, and day 3 at Thiruvanathapuram. The rest of it, I guess we will decide on the way :P
Alex