Trip to Orissa.. Day 1

The preparations for the trip began on the 4th of December early in the morning when I started packing for my 5 day trip to Orissa. The ocassion for the trip is my teammates (ex-teammates) wedding. In the evening after completing my work in office me and my other colleague left office in hope of catching the company shuttle to Aund (a location in Pune). We had planned of catching a bus to Mumbai from Aund since we have to catch our flight to Orissa from Mumbai airport. Unfortunately we missed the shuttle but fortunately got tickets to a volvo that was leavng for Mumbai from the Pune station area.

The journey lasted for around four hours and all the while we were totally confused about the exact location of the Mumbai domestic airport. We finally managed to reach the airport at around 1:00 AM in the morning.

Right now I am writing this post while sitting in the airport waiting area. My flight to Orissa is scheduled to leave at 10:30 AM, and I have no clue what I am going to do for the next 5 hours. May be i'll spend the time reading a book, or may be play a game on my PSP or may be watch a movie on my laptop :P. Guess I have lots of options to kill time, just hoping that I dont fall asleep while sitting here (I haven't slept the whole night :( )

One interesting thing about this airport is that there are 5 WiFi access points here (Kingfisher, Indian, Airtel, Tata Indicom and EZCOMM). Only the airtel connection is free but the credentials are sent by SMS to a cell number after registering the mobile number. I tried registering my phone but the SMS has still not reached me :(.

Hope I get to write a post tomorrow from Orissa. For now I am waiting for my flight and the SMS from airtel.

PS: Pictures attached are of the Chatrapati Shivaji international airport, Mumbai.

Worst travel experience

Here I am writing this post live from the shittiest bus that I have travelled by till date, and since lady luck has totally deserted me I have the worst seat in the bus. Well the bus is Krishna Varun and I am travelling from Pune to Goa, sitting on rightmost corner seat of the last row. There is no leg room, I can’t push the seat back, and once the seat next to me is occupied I won’t be able to move. This is by far my worst travel experience to Goa and I can't blame anyone else for this because I waited till the last moment to book the ticket, even when I knew that there would be rush because of the public holiday on 2nd october. Wait a second, may be I can blame someone, the guy who sold me the ticket. That *$%@ (insert the bad word of your choice) told me that he was giving me a seat on the second last row. Also this guy had told me that tickets of another bus that I preferred were over, whereas I found from my friends that the tickets for that bus were being sold upto 15 mins before that bus left pune.

The bus has just left pune, now lets hope I reach home in one piece. Home seems to be really far away. 12 hours away...

P.S. I have safely reached home and posting this entry from my home PC

Disturbia & Chuk De India

I am writing this post after taking a loooong break from blogging. The reason for my absence was work and exams which I am glad to say are over. Well this weekend I happened to watch 2 movies one was Chuk De India and the other Disturbia. Both the movies were great and if you like watching Hindi and English movies then you should not miss either. I guess most people out there have seen Chuk De India, atleast most people from my office have seen it twice. I was one of the few people who missed to watch it earlier, the good thing was that i didn't have to wait in a long queue to get the tickets and I got good comfortable seats.

Chuk De India is a story of a Hockey player turned Coach of the Indian womens world championship hockey team aka Shaharukh Khan, and his team of girls that has been selected from all corners of India. The movie basically shows how the coach tries to teach the girls to play together as a team and motivates them to win the world championship. The movie also touches upon the fact that cricket is given way too much publicity in India and sports such as Hockey is neglected to a great extent. I particularly liked the fights between the girls and the Haryanvi dialogs of the actor that played Komal Chautala. Its a must watch movie for any cricket fan who is disappointed by the Indian cricket teams performance in England and wants to turn a womens hockey fan.

The main reason I went to see Disturbia was that it had got a 7.5 rating on IMDB and I didn't have much to do on Sunday. The movie is a thriller which revolves around a boy who has been sentenced to a house arrest for 3 months for punching his teacher in the face. The story takes a turn when our hero finds out that one of his neighbor is a serial killer who kills women and preserves their bodies in the basement. I was told by a friend that Disturbia is similar to the movie The Rear Window. I found the movie as thrilling as Vacancy, although Vacancy was a better movie and had much less actors. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone who likes to watch thrillers and who liked Vacancy or The Rear Window (Which I haven't seen).

P.S. I have around 6 posts that I had started but never managed to complete. Hope to publish them soon :P

Barcamp Pune 3

After attending the BlogCamp at Pune last month it was time for me to attend my first BarCamp being held at Pune. According to Wikipedia BarCamp is "an international network of unconferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies and social protocols." For those who are still wondering what Barcamp is, It is a unconference where people discuss and present on technical topics. The BarCamp 3 was held at PSPL Pune's Erendwana center. Altough around 250 people had registered on the wiki I guess around 150 of them actually attended the event. I was especially looking forward to attend the sessions by Abdul Qabiz but unfortunately he was unable to attend the event.

There were some interesting talks like the one by Sudarshan where he used simulations to explain about the complexity found in nature. I also liked the session conducted by Devendra Laulkar on Rapid prototyping using PyQT.

In general all the sessions were gud and the event was organized very well. Unlike the BlogCamp this time the WiFi was working and that helped me in updating the Avast virus definition on my laptop. The only disappointing part was the food. Well most of the people found the food to be good but it was a stone crushing experience for me. I found one stone in the bhaji and a piece of plastic in the rice. Considering that the food in PSPL is famous for it's insect and worm content I was lucky to just find an inanimate piece of plastic.

Well it was definately worth the time and effort spent on attending the event. I am eagerly waiting for the next BarCamp Pune, but hope that the next time the quality of food is not the same...

Blogcamp Pune - II

Blogcamp pune, that’s where I am today. Its a gathering of bloggers from all over India. Well atleast bloggers from Pune and Mumbai are here. And there are representatives from rediff, sulekha and fropper, all here to promote the services that they will be launching soon.

Purplenova was one of the tool that was showcased here which can be used to host a site from your home pc. The Fropper team is going to show a demo of some product at 3 pm. There was a demo earlier given by the sulekha team. And rediff launched a new service called blogshowcase .

Till now the unconference has not been very impressive, all that we got to attend were talks by companies trying to showcase their products. I am looking forward to a few talks in the evening.

It was nice to meet Akshay Mahajan who is going to participate in the rickshaw run, check out his blog here http://trivialmatters.blogspot.com. Those who don’t know what Rickshawa Run is visit this site www.rickshawrun.com. Also the chick who I think was the CNN IBN reporter looked cute. So the event was not totally boring.

If I upload this post today then it will be from my cellphone. These guys were going to provide wifi access but sadly we never got to access the net :-(. Anyways it was a great day, I am with my friends Abhimanyu and Fritz who has come down from Goa to attend this event. For now this is it. I am getting back to the talks..

Blogcamp Pune - I

I came to know about Blogcamp pune frem my friend fritz who is visiting pune to attend it. Well Blogcamp is a unconference where bloggers will be coming together to share their ideas. Its being oeganized at SCIT Hinjewadi on the 16th of June.

Preparations to go for the event began on friday the 15th. Fritz was reaching on friday and all he and myself were planning to stay at Abhimanyus place for two days since Hinjewadi is closer to his place than mine. We had made plans of meeting at the SGS mall Mc. Donalds after office hours. This was just cause we wanted the Shrek toys that they are giving out wit the happy meal.

Fritz and abhimanyu reached late as usual and after some shopping at landmark we were off to have dinner. I got the Gingerbread man and ave still not figured out wat he says. After dinner we made a short pitstop at café coffee day on FC road and from there it was a walk back to abhimanyu's place.

The plan was to go to sleep early and wake up early in the morning to catch the bus to Hinjewadi, but we stayed awake till late. Luckly we managed to wake up on time to catch the bus and reach the venue on time. One bad thing that happened was that nobody else turned up on time.

To be continued live from the event...

Weekend in Goa..

This is an account of things that happened on my last trip to Goa. Let me warn you that this is a lengthy post. I had planned of taking 5 days off from work from the 28th April to 2nd May but due to some unfortunate circumstances I had to cut short my trip to 4 days. Due to nonavailability of bus tickets we chose to travel by train. Brenton accompanied Sudesh, Subodh and me this time. Journey was fun because Subodh was carrying playing cards. We went to sleep late at night after playing cards, naming each others top 5 on the most desired list and of course bugging Brenton.

The next morning we reached Margao station and from there 3 of us took a train while Sudesh preferred to travel by bus. I reached home and after having bath watched Chronicles of Narnia, at home I tend to spend most of my time watching TV because I don't get to do that in Pune. Then it was time to visit the University and meet some friends. We all went out for lunch. Someone suggested a place called Mi Casa on the Shiridao slope. The food was good, I was eating fish after almost a month so it was bound to taste good. Sudesh and Pritam unknowingly had pork but nobody puked so it was fine. Some of us spent the evening on the Miramar beach making plans for the night. The Plan was to go out for dinner and then go to Baga beach to watch the final of the Cricket World Cup on big screen.

At night Pele, Sid, Pritam, Sudesh and me met at Mapusa for dinner. Brenton ditched us as usual. After dinner at Ruchira we headed towards Baga as per our plan. On the way we stopped to watch a cricket match that was being played on the fields close to the Bodgeshwar temple at Mapusa. Pritam was very interested in the match and didn't want to leave from there but we forcefully took him with us. The World Cup Final was very boring. It was a totally one sided match and from the beginning everyone knew that Australia was going to win. Still we waited till about 1 for some miracle to happen and hoping that Sri Lanka would win but that did not happen. Bored of the match we finally decided to go home.

On the second day plans were to go to Colva beach for lunch. We left at 10 in the morning. I was accompanied by Fritz, Hamish, Jesni and Maria all of whome studied with me in Xavier's. The reason we had come to Colva for lunch was because Fritz had read a good review about Joseph's shack on some blog and in Goa I don't mind traveling if I get to eat good sea food. After a bit of searching and asking people we found that the name was actually Josefa. We were disappointed with the shack since most of the stuff that we wanted to eat was not available, so we just had some fish fingers and moved out of the place. We had lunch at Sun Sea Sand which is a shack on the Colva beach.

Next was the movie day. I went to see Ta Ra Rum Pum with some classmates. The movie was good for time pass. Typical bollywood movie with lots of songs. Adit and me had lunch at City Pride which is a small restaurant cum bar on the road running perpendicular to the Kala Academy. The fish there was really good, I especially liked the tisreo. In the evening I met some friends at Cafe Coffee Day Miramar. My cousins wedding was on the 2nd so there was some function at his place on the 1st, I spent most of the morning at his place. Other than that nothing eventful happened on the 1st. My bus was to leave Goa at 7 Pm but as usual it left at 8pm.

Since this was a long weekend most people who work in Pune and Bangalore were down in Goa. The sad thing is that once people start working such weekends are the only time when you get to meet old friends who work in other states. This time I managed to meet some people after a long time but there were a few who could not make it. Hope to see them the next time....