My Collections
Everyone collects (or hoards!) stuff.. all kinds of stuff! here a few things I have (or used to have) a collection of:
Stamps
I have a humble collection of stamps and first day covers. A large part of my collection was inherited from my father and my cousin - so in reality, this collection is the combined effort of three people. I am good at organizing and cataloging things and that's what I did with my stamp collection - I sorted them country wise into stock albums. I have also bought collectible stamps sets from post offices whenever I visited a new country. Once I also tried ordering them over the internet - that didn't feel real though.
Coins
Another humble collections - like stamps, a large part of this collection was inherited from dad. During the 7th grade, me and my school buddies went crazy collecting and exchanging stamps and coins until the teachers put an end to it. That's when my collection expanded. I have organized my collection into albums continent wise. Within the albums, the coins are sorted country wise.
Currency Notes
Most people who collect contemporary coins also collect currency notes - I am one of them. Paper money serves as convenient colorful souvenirs from a trip you (or your friends/family) made to new country. It's quite exciting to look at the variety of illustrations that these notes carry - snapshots of the culture of the country which issued them. Stamps can also serve the same purpose, but you would require lots of them to build a substantial image of the country's culture in your mind - in case of currency notes, you just have to collect all the denominations and you have a pretty nice idea of the lives of the people living there.
Birthday Cards
All the Birthday cards (and Rakshbandhan Cards) that I have gotten from my Friends and Family - I have put them in scrapbooks. There is a separate scrapbook of cards I have received from Nupur.
Photos of Family and Friends
My Dad has been a photographer since forever. He has taken lots and lots of photos which are all stored safely in these albums. Some of these are taken by me too!
Photos of Insects and Animals
Insects are so cool! Their variety and colors are mind boggling. Now that I have a DSLR (Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i), my collection (Insects | Animals) of their photos is going to expand. And Meenakshi Venkataraman's Book on Indian 6 and 8 legged insects is proving to be god-sent in helping me identify these colourful creatures.
Photos of people and places in Mumbai
Being a true Mumbaikar, I and my friend Deeksha decided to capture the essence of Mumbai in our own way. We have a collection (flickr) of photos that we have captured as we move thru lives and lanes of Mumbai. We also have a facebook album of these fotos. Me and Deeksha also put up our fotos to the amazing collection maintained by this facebook group.
Books
I like books. During my undergrad days, I bought a lot of textbooks. After my course was over, I didn't feel like letting them go. Other than these Tech books, I also have an eclectic collection of Fiction/Non-Fiction Novels. Browse my collection @ librarything.com Here are the designs for my bookcase which houses these books. I also got a chance to revamp and upgrade an existing textbook on the 8051 Microcontroller originally written by Kenneth Ayala: Link
Waveforms
I like sticking oscilloscope probes into common electronic gadgets that run our lives and observe various signals that propagate thru them - RS485, I2C, DTMF, Ethernet etc. Of course we can open a PDF or book and find them described/drawn in there, but capturing them live in real life is a nice practical experience. I have put up these on my blog here: Waveform collection.
UNIBlocks
A huge collection of modular electronic prototyping blocks that I designed at Laboratory for Applied Research in Electronics
Page last updated: 11 June 2021