This and that...

So, I just noted that I have been posting a lot of stuff with quite a lot of information. It's high time I posted something that should interest nobody -

• After the accident en-route Paris that featured a Renault smash itself into my car waiting at a traffic signal at a high speed, with me watch the inevitable happen in the rear-view mirror, I see that I have developed a sudden anxiety when cars come up close.
• During the second day of my stay in Switzerland, I noticed the motor-warning lights come on. Being more the hands-on mechanic that trusts the sound of the Engine more than the car electronics, I decided that my motor was healthy and brought my car 350 kms back home without calling the emergency service. It turned out that I was right. A small animal had the cable of the temperature sensor for the Diesel Particle Filter for dinner and left my over-sensitive motor worrying about it. A replacement to the DPF temperature sensor was done, and all is fine again.
• On a more positive note, the vacation in Switzerland was good also because I finally mustered the courage to rent a bicycle and do a long country ride. This was my first time with a bicycle in three years after the previous attempt had shattered my knee and left me on the operating table.

Hmm... This was too boring - right? Okay... After my meet with Microsoft in Seattle, I visited White Sands in New Mexico with Raghu... The sands are unbelievably white as salt!

White Sands at New Mexico

But the drive from Texas (where we started) to New Mexico was quite like being in a Nintendo game where the landscape over a few hundred miles seemed to be like a 100 mts of Scenery repeating over and over again. We saw a thousand oil wells (a lot more than that actually) on the flat Texan landscape and more than once did we wonder about the US requirement to import oil.