I returned to college in mid March for the last two weeks at SCMHRD; two weeks filled with exams and vivas. Began first shot of the exams with the viva for our Finance Paper on 21st March. It was short, to the point and sweet with average marks. We also collected out hall tickets on that day.

Two days prior to that Sneha got placed. It was also the same day that Namrata manage to break a leg (and I?m not talking show business) while shopping. She sure got fussed over for two weeks.

My first written paper was for World Class Management on 26th of March and the paper turned out to be a real bouncer for the entire batch. We still await results, which are due in June / July.

On 26th we all set out for Sneha?s treat at Sigri in Dhole Patil Road, Pune. I had been to Sigri last year for one of the many admissions treats and liked the place. This time we went with the Barbeque buffet and it was simply fabulous. I stuffed myself up with fish, prawns and chicken and washed it all down with three triple scoops of strawberry ice cream.

And, the next day, I went out with the Admissions Team, viz. Anoop, Maria, Radhika and Ravi. Rashmi also joined for dinner. We went over to Rajwada, which I had visited once. The service at that place is painfully slow, but the food is decently edible.

We intended to stop off for ice cream and stuff but rushed to catch the last bus back to college.

The remaining days at SCMHRD were two more papers and a viva, lots of clearance forms and final packing as I headed back home to Mumbai.

The last week in Mumbai was actually just a few days as I got my belongings ready for transportation to Bangalore. Lil white mouse was a real blessing as she helped me a great deal with all this. During the time we manage to spare some time to visit Tunga?s Something Fishy, where we drew up our highest bill ever over prawns and fish and Zodiac, a place I haven?t been to since a very long time.

The transporters picked up all my stuff on Saturday and I dropped my bike over on Sunday before I flew down to Bangalore. The driver who received me at the airport was a very chatty guy and pointed out quite a few places as we passed them during the 90 minute drive to the guesthouse.

Today was the first day at work and was an excellent day. I like the place here. This week, I plan on searching for a good 1BHK in Bangalore.

BTW, in all likelihood, this may possibly be my second last post to be filed under College. The last possibly be the results, if I have the time!

Took the early morning Volvo to Pune on Sunday morning for the last two weeks in college (hopefully).

Aditya picked me up from the Hinjewadi flyover. We headed back and met the others out here for breakfast. Immediately after breakfast, we changed into our formals and paid our exam fees.

Now, all that is left is completely our vivas for our finance paper, which has been scheduled for 21st. As well as collecting the hall ticket for my exams which begin on 26th. Also need to collect material to study for them!

Also, got my S.S.C marksheet which was with the college, as these need to be shown to the company when I join on April 6.

I’m also working on a brand new plugin, while continuing to study AEC. It sure is a major uphill task and wouldn’t have been possible if Ronald hadn’t done a good job in handing over the content to me! I’d love to promise an update soon, but there is at least a month before I can be sure about having a perfect one ready.

I’m still looking for testers for the plugin. I have received only one response so far, and, I’d hate to have the plugin released without proper testing. So, if you’re interested do contact me.

After a brief stint in Pune to complete some college activities, I came back to Mumbai last Sunday. The primary purpose besides staying home was for a special purpose.

My parents were invited over to Lil white mouse’s house for lunch. I came down from Pune and went over to her place directly, while my parents came from my home.

The food was well prepared and delicious as usual. Everyone spent a good number of hours chatting about all topics under the sun.

We finally left the place post 6pm and took the 39 home. Got home and got down to work immediately. This is what would dominate the rest of the week.

I spent a good portion of last week working on my plugins. I released updated to Contextual Related Posts and Top 10. I also released a new WordPress Plugin called Add to Footer.

Lastly, I’ve taken over development of the highly popular WP Ajax Edit Comments from Ronald.

The last week wasn’t all coding. I spent a good amount of time with Lil white mouse. We managed to catch Pink Panther 2 and also made two visits to Dynasty, our favorite eating joint. We also dropped in to my Grandmom‘s place on Tuesday. Our original plan was to order from Subway. However, the outlet in Bandra wasn’t running the offer that is being run at the outlet here in Andheri.

So, we dropped the plan of Subway and instead ordered chicken tikka and chicken sheekh kebabs from the local joint opposite National College.

Spent all of yesterday at home on account of Holi and coding a brand new version of Top 10. You should see the release post in a few hours. Remember to deactivate the plugin before upgrading.

Also worked on my report for Research and Reporting. Have a submission in a few days. We’ve just be lazy at finishing this. Who said, we don’t believe in JIT ?

Dad and me plan to visit an Amway meet in the evening. I came to know yesterday that I have 100 persons in my network. Can’t take any credit for it. I do plan on buying more of Amway’s products, simply because they are excellent. I’ll probably make a post about this in the future.

Blame it on the coding or blame it on laziness or just lack of time due to other pursuits, but this blog hasn’t seen a personal update for a while.

Lil white mouse and me caught the first day evening show of Valkyrie on Friday the 20th on Suburbia, Bandra. Definitely worth watching once.

Prices of movie tickets are supposed to have been reduced, but I definitely didn’t see that!

Lil white mouse’s sister celebrated her 21st birthday on 10th of February and the party was held on 21st February.

She had a good portion of her family over on that day. Reached there a bit early to assist in the preparations for dinner. I love the chicken, mushroom and cheese pie that Lil white mouse makes. Dinner was excellent and the cake that she made was absolutely delicious

We played one game of passing the parcel and I was lucky (read: smart) to get away with a simple forfeit. Check out the other photos in the album.

I’ve been busy working on my plugins all of last week. The first one to to be updated was Twitter Counter followed by Contextual Related Posts and Open Browser Window.

I’ve an update for a few other plugins lined up as well as one or two new ones in the pipeline. Follow my updates on Twitter or via RSS.

Made my way back to Pune yesterday to complete the Finance Paper that we’ve been working on. Collected a mound of data and now the analysis before we meet the faculty tomorrow.

It’s terrible back here eating the crappy food! Did go last night to Fasoos, so it was a welcome change. I crave for pizza. Talking about pizza, Lil white mouse and me were able to get hold of a great buy one get one free offer from Smokin’s Joes last week

That’s it from my life. What’s happening with you?

What better way for a blogger and a developer to pass his time than to blog and develop

That’s exactly what I have been up to this past week or so.

New Plugins

So, the past week has seen a new plugin added to my already growing list of plugins. Over, the next week I intend to continue work on the plugins. I plan on scrapping a few ones which have long since served their purpose as well as reworking others. The latest ones could also do with many feature additions. So stay tuned for a few releases

New look for Techtites

I’ve also been working on a brand new look for Techtites. With the help of Moin, I’ve been able to revamp the entire site to a much better template. Have spent a good portion of the week working on the template. The first and major step was making the theme ready for WordPress 2.7 commenting system.

There’s still much to be done, especially the sidebar. Better ad placements has also meant a better click thru and so a wee bit more income.

New Look for Lil white mouse’s Blog

I also revamped Lil white mouse’s blog. We picked up a new theme. However, it being too narrow for a single column, I spent a good amount of time “expanding” the same for better placements of images etc. I still have to make the theme WordPress 2.7 compatible, with respect to the threaded and paged comments. So, that’s a task I plan on fulfilling over the next few days.

New Look for Weblog Tools Collection

Mark has still not widely proclaimed it, but regular readers would have noticed the brand new theme at Weblog Tools Collection. I’ve been working with him over the past week to convert the XHTML / CSS template into a WordPress theme.

This is indeed rather painful especially if the template and theme are not designed by the same person or in the standard WordPress default theme format.

New look for AjayDSouza.com

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then take a look at the updated AjayDSouza.com.

I recently stumbled upon Glassy Evolution by iSoftwareReviews and the theme just leapt out of the screen and I decided to use it. Thus ended a long hunt for the perfect theme. Well, sadly, this wasn’t the perfect theme either. For one, the theme doesn’t support WordPress 2.7 threaded and paged comments, so yet again, I went ahead modifying the theme for the same.

I’ve also made changes in the footer, getting rid of an About section. That is still a WIP as you can see. So is the sidebar, which will do well with some of what existed in the old theme.

I’ve added some social bookmarking plugins at the bottom of each post, so please do use them for promoting the posts you like

So, below is the old look and the new look.

I’ve also opened up the option of purchasing 125×125 advertising on this blog. There are currently four advertisements available for purchase at only $50 per month which is excellent considering that this blog is a top 100,000 blog as per Alexa, with over 700 pageviews a day.

Some Personal Life

With me blogging on both Techtites and here, I really haven’t had much of a personal life out of the ordinary. Did watch How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and Outlander.

Dinner and lunch have been out quite often, with Talk About, Tamanna, Andhra Mess and Mudra being the joints that were frequented.

The entire next week is lined up with four assignments to complete, as well as a Finance paper that we’ve been working on for college.

If you’re interested in keeping track of my life, do follow me on Twitter.

While making my last post, it completely slipped my mind about our visit to Appa Balwant Chowk in Pune to sell our MBA books. ABC is a well known place in Pune where you can pickup second hand books for MBA, engineering and other streams. There are several raddiwalas there who buy your old books and then resell them to eager buyers who can’t afford a brand new copy.

Hence, every year ABC sees a stream of students dropping in with their old books. We joined this list of students to sell the books we collected in the past 20 months. Any money is good money!

So, Aditya, Akshat, Sneha and me took the afternoon bus to the city. We were joined by Namrata, who had already sold her books the previous day. Got down and Atur Center and took rickshaws to get to ABC. The moment we alighted we were “received” by book sellers interested in purchasing the books. Boy, can they smell students interested in selling books from afar!

One thing I can’t do is bargain. But luckily for me Namrata and Akshat are the experts at this and Sneha and Aditya can provide decent backup! So, I stood with minimal talking while they bargained and sold all our books for a cool 3K. My share Rs. 600

Show me a college student with loose cash, and I’ll show you a student waiting to spend it!

Since we were free, we headed off to Dhole Patil Road which was a good Rs. 50/- by rickshaw to eat Katti roles, some pastries before realizing we just had nothing to do there!

So, it was back to Atur to catch the bus to Aundh, where we dropped in to Idlicious. We learnt to our surprise that they had stopped serving customers and only offered parcels. The reason: the Pune corporation now only permits those with allocated parking to serve customers. This has resulted in the closure of several restaurants across Pune, including Cafe Coffee Day. So, we picked up parcels and then headed back to college where we ate the idlis.

And, that was the closure of an interesting day

No, I am not talking about the movie, but just the last 20 days of my life; life that has kept me so busy that you haven’t read about any personal updates.

So, here’s a quick round up of the last two weeks of my life.

The week from 19th to 24th of Jan was like any other week of my life. Spent all of it blogging, reading, eating, talking and sleeping.

23rd was the first and last test of this semester. The test was on Strategic Marketing. We were given a choice between a two simple questions and a case on TESCO. IMO, education should be practical and case based to ensure that people actually apply their minds to everything. A healthy mix of theory and practicals is ideal. However, MBA turned out to be primarily a learn by rote, which is something I simply can’t do. Hence, was forced to understand and write exams where results took a hit. No regrets on that, because I put in my best and did well so far

Aditya, Sneha, Namrata and me decided to go out for dinner on 23rd. After much pondering we went to Haka’s on FC Road, Pune. The food sucked completely and totally. Really felt like I was cheated of my money.

Took the early morning Volvo to Mumbai on 24th to spend the long weekend at home. Met up with Lil white mouse on 24th evening for dinner. I had to get the taste of the horrible Chinese food out of my mouth. So, we headed off to our favorite joint Dynasty. As usual the crab meat soup was delicious. We ordered the Seafood platter and it turned out to be sizzling and not dry, though I would have sworn it was dry the last time I ordered that.

Sunday, the 25th was a quiet day. Lil white mouse came over in the evening to spend some time.

26th is the Republic Day of India and so a public holiday. As a result the roads are usually empty and people stick home. This weekend was different because many had left the city for the long weekend.

I went over to Lil white mouse’s place in the afternoon and we then went shopping to Westside, near Opera House as it was the last day of their sale. Following this, we returned home and then to 5 Spice in Bandra. We were seated at the Non-Smoking, Non-Alcoholic sections of the restaurant, which didn’t make a difference, since it was a dry day.

The service here was a lot slower, possibly because the design of the place is such. The however, remains delicious

I initially planned on returning to Pune on 27th, but postponed that to the next day. Spent 27th at home, working almost all day. Took the earliest Volvo I could to find my way back to Pune.

The last few days has been dinner at Tamanna, dinner at Mezza9, a class and presentation for Strategic Marketing. Looking at my mention of that subject you may tend to think I’ve shifted to Marketing. Well, no, I remain a Finance graduate. That is just one subject

I’ve given Techtites a new look yet again. So, will be spending tonight working on that one.

Friday at 12am we brought in Sneha‘s birthday by cutting her cake and dirtying her.

After a long day of lectures on Friday, in which we gave two presentations in Strategic Management, we headed out to the city. Sneha and Namrata had finalized on a joint called TC’s in FC Road. We had booked the place for eleven people.

Caught the 7.30pm bus from college which drops us at Atur Center from where we caught rickshaws to the place.

TC’s is decently sized place with a good ambience and service. However, I really wonder why they needed to have the lights fading into various colors!

The prices weren’t that high compared to the other places we have eaten at, but then again, neither were the portions. We were offered 11 tequila shots on the house, a pity only five were consumed.

Then we desperately hunted for rickshaws back to Atur Center and rushed to catch the last bus back to college.

Woke up (or more like was woken up) early Saturday morning as all these folks were off to Alibaug for the weekend. I’m not much of an outdoor person and had tonnes of work so decided to stay back.

Went with Maria and her sister Tina for mass on Saturday. Was asked to and did the Prayer of the Faithful. After mass, we decided to go to Mainland China, which is close to where we had to catch the bus back.

This is my first visit to a Mainland China. The food was decent, so was the service. However, they really need to understand the meaning of the word “spicy”.

The bus back to campus was jam packed, but we were fortunate enough to get seats.

Sunday was a quiet day. We gathered together to bid farewell to Maria, who is the first among all of us to begin her job.

Am really exhausted now and will be hitting the bed soon. Have to still get my hands on photos of the birthday. Will put them in my album.

Began the week with a presentation in Advances in SCM on Tuesday (Monday was just another day). Our job was to rate the supply chain of any company in any sector.

We chose Glenmark Pharmaceuticals. We had to rate their Inventory Turnover, Asset Turnover and Cash-to-cash cycle time to arrive at the final rating.

Yesterday was Pongal, which is a festival celebrated by Tamils on the first day of Thai to mark the harvest. As part of Pongal, there was a special lunch organized with a huge variety of food, sweets etc.

Needless to say I ate a good deal

Spent the rest of the day in my room blogging, catching up on reading and the usual. Asked my roommates to pickup sandwiches from Subway just as they did on Monday. Now, someone needs to go off to the city on Friday

As part of Pongal, there was

As I mentioned, I returned to SCMHRD, rather reluctantly I must say. Spent the entire day catching up on blogging and finally got down to finishing the synopsis for the Finance paper before retiring to bed. Realized I had forgotten one of my hard disks in Mumbai itself, which means a good amount of entertainment awaits my return.

Friday was lecture day. It began with a four hour lecture (which got cut short to two) of Strategic Marketing and this was followed by an Advances in SCM lecture.

Dinner on Friday night was at McDonalds when a whole bunch of us headed out there. The normally freezing AC at the place was off to give us warmth from the cold winter outside

Spent Saturday as well working on my blog. I’ve started the Plugin Review series at WLTC and it’s been met with a great response! This time I will reviewing plugins weekly. If you’re a WordPress plugin developer then submit your plugins.

Saturday evening was spent working on the Advances in SCM project. I still have to complete the presentation. Today is reserved for that. Dinner on Saturday was at Fasoos with Sneha only, since everyone else was out of college, so to speak.

Similarly, Sunday was the Research and Reporting day as well as tomorrow. SIIB had their annual festival spreading across Saturday and Sunday and Sunday night was the rock show featuring Parikrama. So, the entire evening was filled with their music. Except for But it Rained, I’m not a big fan.

As for the title of this post. We received our third semester results on Saturday. I’ve cleared all subjects and hence the title of this post. CGPA is a 2.7 which is good enough this semester

One last semester to get through and yours truly is an MBA.