Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov. You can read all about him on the wiki pages. He founded St.Petersburg. A truly charming town and probably the most European’ised in Russia. It is probably the nicest place I visited West of the Urals.

I also think this town is preserved better than most other places after the great Wars. There seems to be some authenticity to the architecture and the tallest structures seem to be the one constructed by Peter. And the other tall structure is that or Peter himself. History has it that he fought the Swedes here and made St. Petersburg an important port town too. Incidentally, St. Petersburg was meant to be a model of Modern Russian in the 17th Century.

Since I was in the mode of shooting panoramas, I shot this one as a 7 shot sequence too and made a deepzoom composition. I wished there were some people for scale but it was a sunny but cold and windy day, so no luck there. It is really a tall structure, you can observe the apartments at the background for scale.

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.

So my iPhone screwed up on me.  What happened is this, a few days back, the phone started to behave funnily. It started to get extremely hot, especially when running off batteries. Worse was the fact that the battery ran out in a few hours after charge even when the phone was not being used. Seemed to me that some rogue program was keeping the CPU very busy with its computation or may be there was some program constantly accessing the network. It was also possible that the battery was getting wonky and was showing signs of distress.

As a geek, I had a responsibility to do some tests to narrow down the problem before heading to the service center. So I did what I could, after a bit of research from the internet of course.

1. Stopped all background notification services (including push for mail). No change.
2. Hard reset the Phone. No change.
3. Backed up data, restored the phone to factory settings and restored the data. No change.
4. Stopped using music player (assuming some short circuit in the headphone jack. No change.
5. Shutdown the phone for a few hours and restarted it. No change.

Well I would not think 0f anything else I could do except restore the phone and start the setup of the phone from scratch. I thought I’d take a slightly easy way out and called Singtel reg the service enquiry.

As it turns out, Singtel serves iPhone service queries only at their headquarters and I was asked to go there. I went there. One of the service guys looked at the orifices in the phone with lights like a dentist and the first response was.

“Sorry, We don’t fix iPhones. Why don’t you go to the hello Shop near by and buy a new unit at $350. Singtel is providing a cheaper alternate to people who want to upgrade their faulty iPhone.”

I was thinking, and explained to him, “Dude, I have not even told you my end of the story. Further, I came here to ask for some diagnostic info. If I wanted to buy a phone, I would not have come to the service centre.”

Anyway, it seems that Apple does not service iPhones in Asia and it is the responsibility of the telecom companies. And the telecom companies do not service the phone and instead provide replacement. I am OK with the idea, mind you. But I wanted Singtel to tell me to go and “fly kite”* after answering some proper questions. Is it a Software fault? Is it a hardware melt down? Is my battery dead?

As it turns out, the service people seem to be trained to push customers to sales and not equipped to answer technical questions. Pretty sad state of affairs if you ask me.

Anyhow, the guy who attended to me was competent and I managed to get through the idea that I don’t mind buying a phone if my current phone is dead. But I need to know it is really dead.

Eventually, he had to tell me that there is no way for him to find that out and I have to continue my experiments to figure out the life of the phone myself. At least, he told me to carry on with part 6 of my experiment and see if it helps.

So off I went home and promptly reset the phone and Avoided restoring the data. Instead I reinstalled the apps I need and re-setup the mail and contacts sync. I left it to charge for a while. And lo and behold, the phone is back to its original form.

The lesson is this. Singtel has a very weak iPhone service policy and I would strongly suggest DIY fixes instead of relying on Singtel to give proper advice. I am tempted to think Starhub and M1 will have similar policies too. Don’t trust the corporations.

* Fly Kite is a singlish expression.

St. Petersburg is the center of the arts in Russia and fittingly, the grandest and largest art museum, the Hermitage, is located here. I have recorded my impression on the Hermitage here.

Hermitage is a collection of a bunch of buildings and is massive in scale. Photographing architecture is non trivial and I usually don’t attempt them either. But the impressive structure of the Hermitage made me pause. The challenge to capture the immense structure egged me to click away. But I had to be careful what I shoot and how I shoot it. I quickly thought about it, the obvious solution is to shoot a panorama. The light was good (about mid noon) and I had a lens that shoots normal (40mm equivalent). I had to shoot from a distance (of course) and I had enough space as the square was large and due to the winter weather there was no crowd either.

I parked myself in the center of the square, adjusted my stance to the center of the building and shot two sequences of 8 shots each (all handheld). I had to check to see if I had captured the exposure and the framing right. Luckily, the lighting did not change (I shot manual exp of course) due to the overcast skies.

The trouble I realized was that, even though I will get the entire building framed in the panorama, I am going to suffer strange optical distortions. You can observe the building tapering at the far end. I guess I need more rigorous technique to shoot panoramas but I will take what I have.

It is not perfect, but a lot of details and the scale is captured in one image. I have to resort to using deep zoom again for displaying the content. Enjoy the imagery.

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.