Home* his last battle
* at the bottom of the page
* liquid
* marriage
* exams
* Lunch & dinner
* The other half
* It will simply become wet
* No problem, he sleeps at night.
* You will never find an elephant that has only one hand..
* Very large hands
* No time at all, the wall is already built.
*Any way you want, concrete floors are very hard to crack.
I look forward to Christmas every single year. It’s the time of cheer and happiness with the place all lit up and decorated. I usually spend Christmas in Mumbai with an exception being last year, when I was stuck in London waiting for my visa.
This year, I booked my tickets in early August to take advantage of prices when booking early. I must admit that I am sceptical of this so called price advantage! Come December, as expected the pressures at work go through the roof as everyone tries to complete 31 days work in 15 before Europe and the UK starts to slow down for the holiday period. In my line of work, the word slow down is a mirage and this year was no exception.
Anyway, I flew BA to Mumbai on 15 December. The flight was rather uneventful, though severely delayed due to strong winds at London Heathrow. We reached around 40 minutes late at Mumbai airport. Ever since the privatisation of Mumbai airport, we have seen drastic improvements in the infrastructure and going through immigrations is usually a breeze. This time I had to wait a while since quite a few flights seemed to have landed at the same time.
One major issue at Mumbai airport is the terrible state of the baggage handling facilities. I have had to wait for at least 15-20 minutes for my baggage and this time it was a lot worse. After a rather long wait, that seemed like eternity in a terminal that seemed like a furnace my lone yellow bag rambled down the conveyor belt towards me. I managed to fish out the bag and slowly made my way through a sea of people all waiting for their luggage. With no trolleys available on a seemingly busy night, the wheels of my bags were put in motion as I spent another 20 minutes for the pre-paid taxis. By now, you would have expected that somebody would have realised that the biggest delays at the airport are the baggage handling facilities and the pre-paid taxis!
My stay in Mumbai was a lot more pleasant, which saw me visit several restaurants, few shops, a mall and a hospital. And, of course try to get some work done during my supposed “core leave”. Though, this time it was very limited since I wasn’t at home most of the time.
I made my way back to London on 2 Jan, taking advantage of the long weekend. It was back to work after I landed and back to grind for little over a month.
My next trip to Mumbai is in another 45 days!
Here’s wishing all my readers and plugin users a Merry Christmas!
And, as my Christmas gift to you all, I have released v1.8 of Top 10. This version is a relatively large update with major reason being better thumbnail support. I have also cleaned up the code a bit and included some minor adjustments that should make your mySQL server happy (especially if you do not display excerpts).
The main changes are thanks to code from Daedalon.
Changes
- Added: Support for Video Thumbnails plugin
- Added: Thumbnail settings now reflect max width and max height instead of fixed width and height
- Added: Option to display thumbnails before or after the title
- Added: Option to not display thumbnails instead of the default thumbnail
- Added: Counts are now neatly formatted with commas
- Modified: Minor tweaks to improve performance
As usual, you can grab Top 10 from its WordPress page or if you’re already a user, you can update it from within your WordPress admin area.
I released a new version of Top 10 last night, with one major feature upgrade. The plugin now supports multiple widgets, a feature that has been asked by many users of the plugin.
What can you do with this? Well, if your theme supports different sidebars / footers, you can add the widget to every sidebar you would want.
This feature addition is thanks to Jacob Dunn, who sent across the code for its implementation. I have quite a few plans for Top 10 in the pipeline, including:
- Cleaning up the admin area to make it more presentable
- Better CSS support, e.g. not using your theme
- Different built-in styles
- Using timthumb to display the thumbnails
If you would like some extra features, do comment and let me know. Until then, you can grab the plugin from here.
Update: v1.7.6 has been released that fixes a bug in the Daily Popular posts widget
The husband’s on a week long business trip and gets a call from his wife:
W: “Hello, sweetheart!”
H: “Ah yes, darling, I’m busy. Is there a problem?”
W: “Um, I just called to tell you that the parrot died”
H: “My parrot? Dead? The one that won the competition?”
W: “That’s the one.”
H: “Damn ! That’s a pity! I spent a small fortune on that bird. Oh
well…How did he die? “
W: “From eating rotten meat.”
H: “Rotten meat? Where did he get rotten meat?”
W: “He ate the meat of one of the dead horses.”
H: “Dead horses? What dead horses?”
W: “Why, those pure breed ones that you had. They died from all that work pulling the water cart.”
H: “Are you insane? What water cart?”
W: “The one we used to put out the fire.”
H: “Good Lord! What fire are you talking about, woman?”
W: “The one at our house! A candle fell and then the curtain caught on fire.”
H: “What the…!!! But there’s electricity at the house! What was the
candle for ???”
W: “For the funeral.”
H: “WHAT BLOODY FUNERAL ?!!”
W: “Your mother’s! She showed up one night out of the blue and I thought she was a thief, so I shot her!
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