WordPress Plugin Competition Results have been declared. Besides the top three prizes, all plugin authors will receive $10 for each of their plugins in the competition.

The grand prize has been grabbed by WP-Comment-Remix, while the second and third prizes have been taken by Manageable and WP Easy Uploader respectively.

Mark offered me the opportunity to look after the WordPress Plugin Competition 2.5 and I’ve taken it. I’ll be making weekly posts of the same on Weblog Tools Collections as well as on the WordPress Plugin Competition Blog. First post in the series are a few tips for plugin authors seeking an entry into the competition.

Should have posted this a while back, but as usual original posts coming out of a budding MBA student can be rare.

Anyway, I came down to Mumbai on 14th on college work. Our job was to interview an entrepreneur. The problem, he didn’t really have the time. So, this turned out to be a failed project, where the three of us travelled to town, took photographs of a deserted room and then headed home.

Found out that Marol is now connected to Seepz by a flyover, which has cut down my commutation time by over 25 minutes.

The next day, i.e. 15th August is Lil white mouse‘s birthday. Had planned to give her a surprise by dropping in, only to find out that my darling roommates had spoiled it!

The party was good and as expected I helped out. I’m waiting for her to update her blog with her tale of the events. Got home around 12am and awoke by 5.30am to leave for Pune.

Got back in time for my 16th lecture. The class celebrated my birthday with a cake.

Sadly, the jacket which was to protect my clothes from the unnecessary waste of cake wasn’t very useful.

The past ten days have been pretty normal with nothing special under than the normal college life. Have had absolutely no breaks and very little sleep.

The college website work is going well, though it could have been better. Updates on that later.

I also completed judging the WLTC Plugin Competition. The results should be out anyday.

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…

WLTC is hosting the second WordPress Plugin Competition

Rules and Details

• All code must be GPL
• Running time for competition = 2 months starting the 1st of June till the 31st of July.
• True WordPress plugins only. No manual modifications can be required of users.
• You cannot submit plugins that have been released already.
• All plugins require documentation as in the WordPress Extend pages.
• Preliminary support for the plugin has to be provided to the public.

I will be joining Mark this time as a judge of the competition. Well, that means I won’t be able to submit any new plugins that I plan on releasing.

Well, but being a judge is really cool

Received this over email today from my Dad. The email is a bit long but well worth the read:

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste.

To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price.

So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive. Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish.

So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem?
How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan? If you were consulting the fish industry, what would you recommend?

How Japanese Fish Stay Fresh

To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged.

The Lesson

Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired & dull, so we need a Shark in our life to keep us awake and moving?
Basically in our lives Sharks are new challenges to keep us active and taste better…

The more intelligent, persistent and competent you are, the more you enjoy a challenge. If your challenges are the correct size, and if you are steadily conquering those challenges, you are Conqueror. You think of your challenges and get energized. You are excited to try new solutions.

The WordPress Plugin Competition has finally closed with 52 entries! :O

I have submitted my two plugins viz. Transpose Email and Bad Behavior Stats for this competition.

Am really stunned to see the number of entries.
Do I stand a chance?

Went to St. Francis Institute of Technology for their festival Iris’04.

After having practised Counter-Strike for many days we went for the competition out there. What was originally supposed to be a 12 round event turned out to be a 4 round event on two maps. Before you can settle in, you switch sides and play another round!
Add to that it was CS 1.6 and on maps we never play!

Goes without saying we lost miserably! A total waste of time and money

Did make up the time travelling there to play Quake and Need for Speed 5, which was fun though I lost. After all no practise!

Got back home and went to Zero Gravity where we had one hour of CS, which I enjoyed, before going off to Melody’s place to meet her ex-webdesign guy, who didnt turn up. So we went for a half mass and came back home

Just one word describes today. Tiring!

This Post has nothing to do with the live-action movie Counter Struck.

Due to continuous downtime from Friday, I have finally been able to get online to update this blog.

This post will bring you up-to-date on the events of Saturday 7th February 2004.

Along with Nikhil and Saurabh , I went off to attend Eureka, the software presentation, at SNDT’s festival Torque 2004, organized by the Computer Society of India. This was on an all Mumbai level and we present our Steganography Software called IndiSteg (more of IndiSteg shall soon be on my website).

We reached there to find a lot of people with lots of excellent programs and were a bit worried that ours would pale in comparison to them. Anyways, being like we are, we decided to give it our best shot. The judge came and we impressed him a lot, and even asked him to sign over report with his comments (He wrote EXCELLENT!).

We were asked to wait for the prize distribution to find out if we won or not. It was a long wait, but we decided to do it anyways. We were glad we waited, because we won the Second Place:O:O

I am the one in the blue. Nikhil is in between Saurabh & me, and Saurabh is last, standing next to pretty girl in yellow (who I know nothing about)

With that Steganography maintained its cent-percent record of wins. We have participated in 3 events, reached finals of all three and won something at all three!

So in all, Saturday was an eventful day, with a good addition to our certificate collection as well as our wallets )