International Celebrity

It had been ages since i last talked to my room-mates and while thinking about their whereabouts, i was surprised to realise that i didn't even know which part of the world they currently were. So i shot out a mail to find out about them and i was really amused by the replies i got :)

Ananth, the tallest of all, was dragging along his days at Austin. He is on an official business there. Expected to return back to India, sometime in July. Guess what, after all the lack of motivation he got from us so that he would not try any para gliding at Jakkur in Bangalore, he found like-minded people in Austin and here you can see him sky-diving :) [ he is the one in green ]

Prashanth, was back from US, a couple of weeks ago, and we found out that we haven't met for about 3 to 4months now !!! A visit to his home is pending now.

Now comes the very great Murali, aka David, aka "King of Brunei imprisoned in Singapore". Poor lad, he was supposed to be there in Singapore for 6 months, and it has already been closed to 2 years that he hasn't found a way back home.

Prashanth gave a very nice description about our very won David, to show how much truly international he has become :).

<snip>

Here is the list of where David spent his last few birthdays ( July 13'th)

2002 -- Bangalore (remember the India-England match Natwest)

2003-- Singapore

2004-- Guntur

2005-- Germany.

This man is truly international!!!
</snip>

I really liked this description and thought about the places where i have spent celebrating my birthdays ...

And i went nostalgic ........

Catchy Colors Photoblog

Catchy Colors Photoblog

This is a very very beautiful blog. This blog consists of some amazing and colourful images taken from flickr.com. Here you will find pictures which have the most catchy colors as is evident from the title of the blog :-)

I had to blog this so i can have a bookmark of this and let all you readers know about it :-)

Rainbow

rainbow, originally uploaded by Sarfraaz.

Thats a lovely rainbow on the foothills of Ooty.

In the State of Fear

Yes, you read it right. Its not just me, but we all are constantly in the State of Fear. Well, thats what Crichton says in his latest novel, "State of Fear" .. Its an intriguing description of how we fear "global warming" and how various people in this society use this fear to their advantage. Well, the most interesting part of the novel is that, nations have always used this "State of Fear" to control its citizens from time immemorial [ i hope that doesnt exaggerate the point :p ] ... global warming just happens to be the current "Fear" for all of us.

The way Crichton takes you through this is very interesting. I dont want to leak out more information from the novel, and spoil the fun of reading it. I have been into this novel for close to 3 weeks now !!! and i havent yet completed it. Well, i know its a very slow pace, but i dont get a lot of time to read novels these days :( ... Thanks to Bangalore traffic, i have completed almost 90% of the book in 3 weeks reading the book while travelling to and fro between office and home. Otheriwse, i would have taken even more time to read it i suppose.

A couple of weeks back, my uncle and aunty had come over to our home. This was infact their first visit to our home. It was good to have them, but i hope they were not bored. Atleast they didnt seem to :) .. We had been for a small trip to Nandi hills, which was incidentally, my first long trip on my new bike :-). If it was not for my camera chip that gave way halfway through, i would have posted some nice cool pics here.

Last week, i had been to a wonderful trip to Masinagudi, a place adjacent to Bandipur forest, and very near to OOty. It was a very beautiful time of the year to visit that place, with light rains and green trees all around. We were 15 guys who went there !!! ... yeah right, 15 !!! .. we went in 3 cars and 3 bikes. I was not allowed to use my bike :( so had to travel in a car which was such a bore !!! ... If you like bike riding, you will definately not enjoy the car ride... The only adventurous thing we did there was to go for a night safari in an open jeep, and we sighted 4 bisons, as close as 5 meters away from us !!! ... the jeep dirver was so confident, that he would turn the jeep right into the bison, so that the jeep flood lights would focus on it and we could see it and capture some images. Unfortunately, none of us had any good night capturing cameras :( and we didnt get any great snaps of those beasts. We also saw quite a number of deer. so many that on the way back, we didnt find sighting a deer interesting enough anymore. You can have a look at some of these snaps at http://flickr.com/photos/s_raaz/sets/481979/ [ I have one snap for our Kannada film industry fans ;) .. so enjoy it ;) ]

Gnome cvs servers are being relocated by RedHat, and because of this outage, we are not able to do any great work today and hence this blog :p .. Well, it was really long that i had posted anything here anyway !!! Should be posting a good snap too now in my next blog.

Long since no see :-)

Oh, its been ages since i have blogged anything here. Lots and lots of things happening around. First of all, my parents have moved to stay with me at Bangalore, so thats the good news now :) ... Good food i should be saying :-) rather.

Finding a decent house, in the given budget with the list of "mandatory" things to be in a house, was one hell of a job. But then, all's well that ends well :) .. All are happy with the home, and thus the 3 weeks of effort and seeing close to 30 houses, has atlast yielded its results. My parents actually didnt take much time to get adjusted to Bangalore and that was a good thing indeed. But after staying alone for close to 9 months, its been a bit tough for me to get adjusted instead :-) ... yeah, i know it sounds strange, but thats the way it is. I am slowly getting used to the fact that i need to reach home early, and that i need to think about other's schedules before i make my own, and any plans i make for an outing should have the plans of the rest of them matched as well.

On April 30th our new LDG group had been visiting to Talekadu, a fun-filled holiday resort, where we spent some really good time. Some of the good photos on that trip are here.

There has been a lot of work going on for the evolution 2.4 release for exchange, and here is a list of things we are currently working/sloggin on. We are planning to finish of these features by June 15th, so that we are intime for the actual feature freeze which happens to be on July 11th according to this GNOME release page.

And before i forget, here's my best friend's blog :-) .. and another blog of my new team-mate Praveen