Sept 13th: Climb 'The Matterhorn'

The "Matterhorn", 4478m, 45°58'N 7°39'E, is one of the most popular mountains in the alps. It can be reached from Zermatt, Switzerland or Breuil/Cervinia, Italy. The first men who managed to climb to the top of this mountain was a group of seven mountaineers led by Edward Whymper from Great Britain on July 14, 1865. Four of the seven men died on the way back.

The ascent of Matterhorn must be taken seriously. This document alone does not contain sufficient information for an ascent of Matterhorn! Even experienced climbers are advised to hire a Guide. Inexperienced climbers should not attempt an ascent of Matterhorn as their first mountain. Route finding is difficult; a guide may well be a good investment if you are to reach the top in one day. A guide is also a good life insurance when the unexpected occurs. There are many easy 4000m peaks in the area to practice on, that will give you the necessary experience. Anyone attempting to climb Matterhorn should be in top physical shape and well familiarized with crampons. Your body should be well adjusted to the altitude. The best time for an ascent is from mid July to mid September, depending on the amount of snow on the mountain.

So we hired a Guide named Baskar, infact the guide recruited us while giving us the pep talk documented above. That was to be our mission from mid-July to mid-September 2004. The team consisted of Vidhya, Mayank, Sandeep, Ajoy, Ayush, Vishvesh, Sudheer and me. Sridhar and Sudhakar were like the gurus meditating on the mountains to whom you went to for enlightenment. They picked us up when we faltered. We managed to reach the mountaintop without much trouble, having scaled a few more challenging ones before this current endeavour.

'Matterhorn' is the erstwhile Impulsesoft’s variant of a Dick tracy watch. Its a wireless data watch that provides informative, entertaining and targeted information on a watch display, by connecting to Bluetooth enabled mobile phones/devices. A thin client by architecture, it could be considered as a dumb screen and keyboard which connects to a remote device over Bluetooth. It could be used to receive and display information and control the remote device, while being easily accessible.

Working in the basement of the quaint house we call an office, we conceptualized the product, designed the h/w (PCB) for the device, and wrote the s/w right from the device drivers to the application stuff, the complete product. One such mobile device that it could interact with was a mobile phone; receive events, alarms, notifications, SMSes, call handling etc. Oh yeah, and in addition to that it could also tell time. We have been recognised for the innovative products that we have churned out. However 'Matterhorn' was one of those devices that didn't see the light of day. It is one of those stories from down under.. err.. the basement and we did it On 'Dick Tracy' Time. We were just like those many teams of geeks around the world that set out to make 'The Soul of a New Machine'.

Talking about Dick tracy watches and souls of new machines, we managed to get our hands on a GPS trainer watch, called Forerunner 305, made by Garmin, that uses the famous SiRFStar3 GPS chipset built by our company. It records your run, including location, speed, pulse rate, calories burnt, timings, altitude so that you can analyse yourself better and monitor your improvement over runs. I'm planning to use the device to record my run during the marathon. I'll be tracking my locomotion again and hopefully this time I won't get lost.

BTW I checked my pulse rate and it went as low as 50 at one point :-)



Sept 14th: Painter Song