It’s my birthday today! With that, I edge just one year away from three-tenths of a century.

And, as a gift to met, I’ve spent a good portion of the night working on a new theme for this blog, one which was long pending.

After a lot of searching I came across Paperpunch Theme by The Theme Foundry which I fell in love with almost instantly.

Paperpunch is a clean and easy to use theme, yet comes packed with some decent free features. You can upgrade to the Pro version which makes life a lot easier!

My plugin Add to Footer definitely made life a bit easier, since I didn’t need to add in a lot of code for my analytics.
However, the theme required a good amount of modification to capture my header and sidebar, pages, comments and other features that I have maintained across themes across several years. Not to forget the ads that help sustain this blog.

Lastly, SexyBookmarks WordPress Plugin does deserve a major mention for it is extremely feature rich and with minimal interference allows you to share content of this blog with your friends through the most popular social networking sites. You are recommending these posts, aren’t you?

I’ve also included a neat little array of buttons at the top of each post, you can quickly share our posts on Facebook and Google Plus.

Until next time… do keep reading and do comment below and tell me if you like this new theme. If not, what can I do to improve it?

And, have you hit the like button at the bottom of this post to add Ajay – On the Road called Life to your Facebook favourites?

Wishing all my dedicated readers a Very Very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2010! How did you bring in the new year? I spent it quietly at home.

Looking back at 2009, I must say that it has been a rather successful year for me on all fronts. While I may not have achieved most of the goals I set for Techtites, it was definitely a lot better than 2008.

I have refrained from setting any goals for this blog, primarily because it serves as a personal blog.

At this time of the year, I normally make a very detailed post about my activities during the year. This year, I’ll refrain from a very detailed post and just make a short and sweet summary.

I began the year knowing that I had a good job in hand. I spent the first three months of the year completing my MBA. I joined the bank in early April and have slogged patiently and diligently over the last nine successful months.

I have also ensured that I continued making regular posts both at this blog and at Techtites during this duration. It’s a hobby that I have ensured that I have not given up, despite the long work hours.

On the coding front, I took over the development of Ajax Edit Comments in March from Ronald. Honestly, I didn’t make much progress on that front and a few months later, Ronald returned to continue the development of the best comment editing plugin for WordPress!

In December, Ajax Edit Comments became a premium plugin available to all users on a paid subscription basis. And, for a limited period you can get the basic subscription for only $10/year.

The downloads of my other plugins have also increased over the last year. I have released several updates to my plugins and my theme. I also plan on quite a few updates on both these fronts. I have had a few themes that I hoped to develop just lying around, so am hoping to finalise and release some of these.

And, lastly, the highlight of year 2009 without doubt was my engagement to Lil white mouse.

Looking forward, I hope and pray that 2010 turns out to be an even more successful year than 2009!

The last month reminds me of 2007 when I just entered SCMHRD as a budding MBA student. Life was totally crazy then since I just didn’t have the time to blog or even check my email.

That is something that I have been feeling off late. Well, blame it on my exhausting job. In my line of work, the only thing that keeps us going is the level of enjoyment we have at work. Otherwise, I am sure I wouldn’t have survived! On the work front, I’ve been working non-stop on a good number of weekends!

Lil white mouse came down last month, so I finally got to spend sometime with her. Though, I must confess that I am one of the most boring hosts ever.

The only two places we really went visiting was Star Bazaar, to pick up much needed supplies, that would last us over the weekend. We also dropped in at one of her friend’s place for dinner.

I had an extra day off in which I tried really hard to complete a new version of Better Search. However, I wasn’t very successful, since I had to scrap much of the changes.

I also realised that the feature rich Media Temple wasn’t the best solution for this blog. I’m really surprised at the kind of resources this consumes, but I almost shot way over the 1,000 GPU cycles. Had to move my blog out of there in a hurry. By my estimates, I would have easily had to pay $20-30 more.

So, I finally took the plunge into a VPS yet again. This time I decided to give ServInt (aff.) a shot, since it had a really good plan.

Spent a good portion of the week after that optimising the server. Am pleased with the results so far. I’ll make a post on Techtites sometime soon on basic optimisation tactics.

On the fun angle, to bid farewell to one of our colleagues, we went off to Purple Haze on Friday. It’s a nice pub in Koramangala. It was a good break after the crazy work life.

And, in another six days, I’ll be in Mumbai!

When someone decides to message you all of a sudden and grumble that you are not blogging, then it is an indication that it has been a while. Well, I know it has, considering the last post was a month back. However, my life is so full of work, that I honestly, don’t have much to blog about.

Anyway, as an update, I have been working long hours all through the week and the concept of weekend is a blur. e.g. I worked till 1.30am on both Thursday and Friday! Weekends that do come along are spent with me resting all day long.

Well, that’s life of an investment banker. I knew the hours would be long, but didn’t expect it to be this long. Normally, this would have been a problem, if I wasn’t enjoying the work so much, I would definitely have hated it!

Talking about investment banking, as of yesterday, I completed two whole months as an investment banker! I know these two months have been simply amazing. The learning curve has been very steep, but I think I’m doing just fine.

What about my plugins, blogging and the rest of the world of IT? Well, it is there. I did put in a few posts at Techtites a while back when I had a full two days. Otherwise, Umar has been doing a good job so far. And, Shahrzaad’s occasional posts have been helpful in keeping the blog alive.

As for the plugins, sadly, they require a dedicated amount of time which hasn’t been a luxury I can afford. However, I have tried my best to support the same in the forums.

I am taking leave at the end of this month, as a break and also to take a trip back home. Hopefully, I should have the time to get in some coding as well!

It’s been almost a month since my last post. And it just goes to show how tied up MBA life has kept me. Based on feedback from seniors this is going to be the case for atleast another two or so months.

A lot has happened since then, and I’ll just be summarizing a few of the main events in this post.

To begin with, we had our foundation course exams. Principles of Management is a sure flunk, and that’s the case of most of the batch.

My maths paper ended up with hundreds of silly mistakes and clearing this seems to be a bleak possibility.

The financial accounting paper was an objective one of which we got the results the same day. Passed!

The other papers seems to be a case of pass as of now, so lets see how that goes. Results are out any of these days.

Aditya wanted to pick up his laptop from his uncle’s place in Mumbai, so I accompanied him on a Monday. It was a quick stopover at my place to pick up more clothes. Our laundry guy is quite a pain in the neck and take a long time to give the clothes. I’ve started washing all my clothes including the shirts and pants by myself.

The next event on the list was Milaap. Milaap is the “welcoming” session that juniors throw for seniors. It is supposed to be a cultural event, something I keep my hands out of.
Was asked to design the online invitation and send it out to all the faculty and staff, which I did. Was then called on to bring the costumes from Pune. Akshat and Gunjan accompanied me on this journey. It was my first trip to Pune, though I didn’t see much of it. Got two whole years for that, though I prefer getting back to Mumbai if I have time.

Last week also saw our very first FCQ, which is a Fortnightly Conducted Quiz. All we are told is the date and timings of the FCQs. We come to know about the exam only when we sit for it.
The two exams were ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and Basics of Economics. Got the result for the first today, scored an 18 on 20, which is a good start.

The Lil’ Mouse dropped in to say hi to me over last weekend, which was rather cute, since I haven’t seen anybody in Mumbai since I came here, except for the quick Mumbai trip.

I’m also in the Website committee working to rebuild the SCMHRD Website.

SCMHRD Life continues now. Until next time. Do comment if you have any experiences.

My course at SCMHRD began with the Induction ceremony on 2nd of June. The induction involved the Founder of SCMHRD giving his short speech followed by that of the MD of Maruti, who was the chief guest. These were followed by speeches by the Director and the the Admin head. After a short lunch break, we were presented with a short case study and then the introductions by the faculty.

With this, the day was wrapped up along with the promise of a long and lengthy Outbound Learning (OBL) Program on Sunday, the 3rd. Sunday the 3rd is a very special day for me and I was hoping to have spent it in Mumbai itself, but unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.

Though we had to wake up early for the OBL, a group of us went out to Tamanna for dinner. The idea was to sink our teeth into non-veg, well atleast it was the case for around six of us.

The OBL is a program held every year by SCMHRD for its new batch. The purpose of the same is several fold. The primary purpose is to introduce us to each other and get to know the persons in the batch. It also aims to foster team work with a great number of team games and introduction sessions.

It was simply put, really good. The OBL was held at a small place called Lekha Farms, which is located on NH4 (the highway connecting Pune and Mumbai). We began with a set of games before breakfast.

The first game, couldn’t really be called a game, but I’ll call it “Toss the Ball”, where you simply had to call out the name of the person and toss the ball to him and her. Worked well to find out the other 22 people in my group (the entire batch of 197 was divided into about eight or so major groups and then subdivided into two groups each).

This game was followed by a Carriage-Rider game. Two persons formed a carriage by holding arms together and transported a “rider” to the other end. At this end, one rider became the chariot and vice versa and the three would return. We screwed up and got disqualified.

The third game was required two persons to hold a ball with their backs, reach upto the finish line and return. This was a relatively difficult game, but we managed to grab the second spot of four.

The fourth game was yet another one which we were disqualified from… this involved us forming a human chain and with twelve persons in a line, any human chain is majorly challenged.

We broke for breakfast after this, which was medu vadas and idlis… I must mention here, that the mess food has been pretty good so far, but this is just the end of the beginning as Winston Churchill would say.

Breakfast was followed by an extremely difficult but a hugely team oriented game, which required the entire team to assist each other to get through four increasing levels of ropes tied across two poles (imagine getting inbetween the rungs of a ladder, with the top rung higher than when I stand on my toes with my long arms stretched point upwards (I’m 180cms).
This took up the entire time upto lunch as we struggled but got it done with.

Lunch was not at all tempting, but I had to eat for the energy. The period after lunch involved us doing the Burma bridge, and me also trying the Monkey Crawl (though there wasn’t much crawling )

The monkey crawl was followed by a “I introduce my partner” (in a group of three) session and a team game, where we trashed the competition. Must say that yours truly was influential in coming up with the idea

The last game of the day, was a sheep and shepherd game with the job of the shepherd to lead his blindfolded sheep into the penn using only a whistle. We rocked!

The day came to close with us heading back to SCMHRD, wasting some time out there and then finally hitting the beds, extremely tired.

Monday to today has just been jam packed with classes and assignments. Our foundation course exams begin on Wednesday and I’m still far behind. Most of the profs are good and I’m understanding stuff. Non-acads (gym, swimming, aerobics and yoga) will also be beginning in full force from next week, though we have been given a taste of these).

I’ve been offline most of the fortnight (with only minor mail checking and chatting) because of the schedule and also because of stupid Reliance (the the only thing you can rely on is inefficiency and lies). This was finally resolved this week.

Also had the first set of exams of the foundation course, which included Economics, Maths and Computers. My steady track record of screwing up my Maths papers hasn’t left me even now.

This post will not be complete without me stating that I have really good roomies. The first one is Aditya from Bangalore, a brain and a sportsman rolled into one. The second is Akshat, who is as mad as us. The three of us will soon be labelled the “Three Stooges” of SCMHRD.

It may have been only 15 days, but it sure feels like a long long time. The end of the beginning…

Until I get to blog again…

I signed up for Twitter a month back, but haven’t bothered to keep in touch with the program. Rishi told me today that he’s tracking my updates via Twitter, so am throwing up this question to all my readers if you Twitter.

If you do, how do you update your status?

Would you track my updates?

You can add me at http://twitter.com/ajaydsouza
Or simply send FOLLOW AJAYDSOUZA to twitter@twitter.com from your GTalk ID.

Took a new photograph of me because the negative of the old one seems a bit damaged.

However, both developed well and now the option is out to you.

Comment and tell me which of the two you prefer. There is no third option, so those ready to say neither… well, I can’t stop you from saying it

Additionally, do tell me why you chose that particular pick. How about a label for them?

Is it:

Old Photo

or is it

New Photo

Waiting for your comments…

Regular readers of WLTC must have found a lot of posts by me since the beginning of this year.

Weblog Tools Collection is one of the biggest blog resource sites which I’ve been reading for a good number of years now. I used to post my theme and plugin related notifications out there.

Late December, Mark asked me start writing for WLTC and I happily jumped at the offer

Here’s the formal announcement.

You will now see my posts regularly at WLTC. I will be covering WordPress news, reviews and analysis of plugins, themes, hacks as well as general blogging related topics.

This is a great opportunity and an equally great learning experience to be writing for a site the size of WLTC (it gets more hits in a day than this blog get in a month :O ).
I’m reaching out to several thousand people, if not more, besides being on the Dashboard of all users of WordPress.

Thanks Mark!

Zooomr is an amazing photo service which in my opinion is a lot better than Flickr.

Zooomr offers bloggers a free Pro account and this post hopes to get me one of those

And that is me in the picture up there. It was taken about a year back during my trip to Khandala.