Waves

Yay!! I got my first salary 2 days ago. Tell you what, after a saree for grandmom, a mobile for my bro, wrist watch for my mom and some more expenses and treats later, all that remains of the first salary is Rs.252/- he he!!! We spent two full days shopping weird things. Ok.. that apart, let me you share with you, a little surprise I gave my mom.

After I got my salary, I never asked my mom what she wanted nor did she ask me anything. So, when I went outside along with my friends, we stopped at a Titan watch showroom. We spotted a watch that had a small oval display with a flower designed silver strap. It was superb. Mom would love it. We paid for it and gift wrapped it. I never told her that I got her a watch.

Night came and we all slept. I got up at about 12.30 AM, took the gift wrapped watch and placed it above the stove in the kitchen. Today morning, she was damn surprised to see a gift for her. She was like, “Oh! my God, this is beautiful”. Her eyes were filled with tears. Brushing them aside, she wished me all the best for a good career ahead.

Yes!! already everybody is getting a lot of spam in our email accounts. Thanks to the spam filters, otherwise our inbox would be rendered useless. I just came across this new thing in yahoo mail, where if you give an invalid username and some password, it takes to a page similar to the one shown below. Remember, an invalid id and invalid password. Look at the text I have blocked in the screenshot. Won’t it pave the way for more spam?

It’s raining outside… The weather is so lovingly cool that there is nothing to beat this situation. Rains clattering the sun shade above the southern window, the wind chime hung on the curtain rails danced to the slight wind creating the familiar klink-klink sound. I was mesmerized by the beauty of nature.

A quick zing into the recent past… 9 months ago… It was 2.30AM in the morning. Myself and Moyeen were wrapping up the discussion for our project work. We were preparing for a review that was to be held the following day. Very tired, I washed my face and headed to bed. I immediately fell asleep. About 2 hours later, I woke up. I was riding down the dull lighted roads to a small park nearby. It was dark and there were some people doing some early jogging. Birds started chirping too. I didn’t know where to wait. Few minutes later, this girl turned up. She was wearing clothes around the orange shade and said an enthusiastic “Good Morning!”. Brightened up at the sight of her, we both walked for sometime and settled at one of the park benches.

She turned, brushed her hair aside and stared straight into my eye, the stare that you have to encounter to believe. Our knees were touching slightly. We started talking, smiling, laughing… slowly at first and then discussing 2 million things around the universe. By now, the sun is out. More joggers are up. A small team of grandpas formed a circle a few yards away and were laughing their heart out. All these distractions were immaterial to us. They happened as if it were in another world.

Slowly, my face became slightly wet. I became a bit uncomfortable. More beads of perspiration began to fill my face. They grew so much that, they started flowing. My t-shirt was suddenly so wet. In a fit of discomfort, I yelled and discovered that my mom had poured a glass of water on me to wake me up so that I could get the college bus on time….

Ah! amazing! is the only word I can say of today’s sessions. Karthik ‘spammer’ Kannan started the day on “Branding via Blogs”. Next on line was the best photographer, Sharad Haksar. His excellent session was on “Professional Photography”. Sharad shared his experiences in a very lucid manner. You had to be here for the session!

Sujatha from PodBazaar was live on skype at 10.30 AM. She talked about Podcasting in general and how podcasting is a great platform for promoting oneself, giving tutorials, voice advertisements, corporate alignment etc. She was also talking about free softwares, especially audacity. Infact, they are coming up with a series of podcasts on audacity so that beginners on podcasting would benefit from it.

Sunil Gavaskar, alias Sunny alias Little Master 🙂 arrived well ahead of time. He was waiting for the podcasting session to finish and started off with lots and lots of cameras clicking at him. He finished his session and also answered a couple of questions from the chat channel that is open for ‘blogcamp’ers. Hey, he even posed for a photo with us on request.

Day 2 is seriously great!

I soon shifted back to the first floor mini auditorium. A small tech crowd formed there and bosky was in full flow with “Ajaxifying your Blogs”. He even showed us some really cool demos that he had developed using ajax. Check his blog. Continuing on this topic, we had another guy named Karthik. He is a long time web user turned web designing hobbyist. He showcased his skills as he unravelled his story about the way he developed his own blogging software that runs on his site. It gave a lot of inspiration for the many of us who complain of not having time to do other small things that we are passionate about.

Ford announced an iPod contest and hey, we are running live blogging, photo blogging, video blogging and podcasting contests too! Join the fun. Moving down, the sessions scheduled today were over. We have hired a bus and we are moving to the beach house in another 30 minutes. Yay!!

Catch you soon…

Blogcamp is going on great :). We are almost on the end of a very energetic day 1. We had different workshops on track 2 and sessions on track 1. Track 2 was more of an unconference style. GAPP started track 2 with a preview of wordpress.org and wordpress.com, with Prasanna continuing on Beta Blogger. I did a quick 20 minute session on wordpress hacks.

Kausik, Kiruba and Ram Viswanathan continued the afternoon session with a beautiful workshop on podcasting. This session started off on a conference style. The audience couldn’t hold it long and soon started pitching in. Kausik was almost ragged towards the end of the session. Varun then started off with mobile blogging and now Bosky is on with “Ajaxifying your blog”. Amit Agarwal is on an interactive session at track 1. He is talking about “Professional Blogging”.

We are about 150+ strong bloggers, techies, podcasters, video blogers etc. etc. all at one place, having superb fun, sharing knowledge and experience. By the way, did I tell you about the 10 dedicated computers for live blogging? hey, we are also webcasting the event live! Head on to blogcamp.in and see it. My session would be up on my tech blog and on bothack shortly. More on the event coming soon……

Wow!!! look at that! Anna University, one of the foremost universities in India has a RedHat test page.

Here’s the screenshot.

Lot of things, yes! quite a lot of things have been happening now on the front of BlogCamp. Myself and Moyeen have designed the website for BlogCamp.In, with Hitesh giving inputs on the overall design of the page. I did the design and layout. Moyeen took care of the ajax part. Based on the homepage for blogcamp.in, I created a wordpress template for the blog so that we have a consistent look over the website as a whole. The site is now open. Ofcourse there are many things missing; like many URLs are broken except http://blogcamp.in and http://blogcamp.in/blog.

It has been an amazing experience learning the working of wordpress. Hey, did I tell you that I’m the mini webmaster? Yes, I’m managing http://blogcamp.in. If anything on the site doesn’t function as expected, I get an email or a phone call and I just love it. The wiki is getting ready now. It will be up tonight (most probably). You can check it at http://blogcamp.in/wiki.

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Did a video cast in the evening with a 73 year old lady, who also happens to be my cousin’s grandma. Will upload it to youtube soon. It is in tamil.

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Got the equipment for doing a podcast with Kennedi G. Have to test it and schedule the podcast :D.

Well, that’s it for now 🙂 Bye!!

The situation is pretty simple. Three people entered the Prime Minister’s residence at about 8.45 PM tonight without any documents or appointment what-so-ever. They were until gate 2 and were then turned back. A pretty serious issue in terms of the security concerned.

Now is a ripe time to blame the media. NDTV reports that their reporters had chased down the car to get an interview of the breachers. I had been seeing the news channel for about 45 minutes now and every 5 minutes, the interview is being played. Watching it was funny though. And showing the interview for every 5 minutes was like castrating those 3 young people who came upto the reception.

According to me, the 3 people are not to be blamed. As far as I saw, the media never interviewed any security personnel who let the car in. Leave off the interview, they never even showed us their god damned face. This shows clearly that the media is perfect in character assasination. They never told why the security personnel let them in. Interviewing the 3 people is only part of the story. They should have interviewed the security personnel too. More so, the security personnel should be punished for letting in a car without checking.

This security lapse clearly shows the reason behind the attack on the Indian Parliament.

Sometime back, Sudar told about Google experimenting its UI designs. I think it’s my turn today, as I had this new UI during the display of search results. I grabbed a screen shot and about an hour later, the redesign vanished. I had read at lots of sites that Google’s simplistic design of the Google homepage wasn’t enough to showcase their products, the result being not all their products are as popular as the search engine.

Here is the screen shot of the new layout. Look at the menu on the left. There is no menu above the search text box, which usually consists of web, images etc.