I made my last personal blog post four months back. Since that very date, my life has changed, a change I never expected to come to pass, a change that till today makes me wonder if it is for the better or worse.

Since then I have been involved in many things, including a few parties and the Arsenal vs. Fulham game.

And, if you missed the match, here’s a video of Samir Nasri scoring the first goal

I also had my first experience with snow about two weeks back when I woke up to falling snow. Set out with great excitement, took two steps and landed flat on my back. The next time I set our I slid the way to work. Still need to go out and buy good shoes, scarf and some head gear.

Currently am sitting at home on a two week break, twiddling my thumbs and wondering about the possibilities.

Decided to look back into my blog to figure out when I had last posted and let’s just say that it was a long long time ago!

So, am going to make a quick post to tell people that I am still alive and kicking; ok, not kicking…

The past month has been extremely busy with longer days and even longer nights. But, that’s work.

On the personal front, I finally got the chance to catch Inception. This time the theatre we caught it at the Cineworld theatre in O2 Arena.

The break was well enjoyed, though we spent a good time actually getting to the place! We got onto the DLR to head toward Greenwich, only to realise that we had to get to North Greenwich, which is on the Jubilee line. As expected, the Jubilee line was down, but we thought that we’d be able to get a bus to the O2, only to find out that one of the buses that goes to the O2 passes through Greenwich. So, we headed back to the DLR station and headed off to Greenwich. After a good deal of searching and an equal amount of walking, we found the bus stop and I enjoyed my first bus-ride in London.

The O2 arena has been built really well with a host of restaurants, the stadium, games areas, a roller-skating rink and of course, the movie theatre. We bought the tickets and settled in at Nando’s for food. This is one place I haven’t gotten fed up of the food.

The movie was spectacular. I don’t know when I will actually get down to writing a full fledged review of the movie, but the ending was excellent, though I did expect it. The best part of the entire movie was the concept. The special effects were good, especially the last 30 minutes or so.

The best part of the day was the return journey. Because the DLR was down, boat replacements were put in place from the O2 to East India, which we took full advantage of.

That’s one pic above from the London Calling album

Was at work today and this week promises to be as work filled as ever. So, am hoping to see if I can get a post across next week.

My secondment at my company got me flying off to London and I fell in love with the city the minute I stepped out of the airport. And, I have grown to love the place even more in the past three weeks.

I must confess that I haven’t seen much of this place, because I have been working a lot more out here than back in Bangalore! But, the work is good and responsibility is even better. I am hoping that the week to come will be a bit lighter.

I landed here on the 3rd which was a bank holiday out here in UK and so grabbed complete opportunity of seeing some parts of London.

Hope to get some more tomorrow.

Photos on Facebook: http://su.pr/566o5r

I’ll upload some to my album soon. Still need to get the T-Mobile Content Control knocked off!

I’ve been using Flickr Photo Album on this blog for a long long time now, maybe well over a few years. However, in a bid to reduce memory usage at this blog and to also utilise my unused domain AjayDSouza.info, I decided to move the location for my photos.

In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site.

I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely easy to use, smal, but very powerful script for displaying photos from Flickr.

AjayDSouza.info will now serve as the primary location for display of my photos. With a little .htaccess magic, I have redirected all existing links on this blog to the site. Please let me know if you notice any malfunctions / broken links.

I plan on working on the stylesheet and theme but that will be at a far later date. Until enjoy my photos.

Those of you following me on Twitter would have seen a status message that read:

Room 103 is the first room in college to get placed.

Akshat and me were place by November 25 and late last Thursday night, we got the good news that Aditya too was placed. In fact he’s got an excellent job with one of the highest salaries in campus

And, we are a hungry group.

So, we booked a cab on Friday night and headed out to Stone Water Grill in Koregoan Park. This was recommended to us by a friend and it was a first visit to the place. Turned out to be a really good location with great service and a good ambience.

We ate and drank and they danced and we brought up a bill that justified Aditya’s high salary.

I’ve still to get the remaining photos. I’ll upload them to my Flickr album when I do so.

Anyway, we reached college at 2.30am, which excluding New Year’s last year is one of the latest I’ve returned.

The last few days have been as lazy as it has been. One extremely irritating thing is the lack of a proper internet connection because our excellent network folks (I shudder to use the word admin) are busy experimenting with the wifi adapters. I plan on writing a really dirty post about this so called “wifi connectivity” that is promised students out here.

Made a 30 mark worth presentation yesterday for World Class Manufacturing. A day’s work that completes one half of the valuation for that subject. This week is a little tight with lectures (well comparatively)!

The last time we had a major terror incident in Mumbai was when the bombs rocked the train in Mumbai in 2006. Mumbai is no stranger to violence when in 1993, we were hit by a series of blasts all across the city.

However, this time things are different. I reached home at around 10.30 last night after having dinner at Dynasty with Lil white mouse. She informed me off a shooting incident at Leopold in Colaba. I switched on the news to read about the incident and within the next hour realized that it wasn’t just a stray firing but what would turn out to be a full fledged terror attack.

It started off with Cafe Leopold at about 9.30pm and then the Taj Mahal hotel, Hotel Trident, CST Station, Vile Parle, Mazegoan, Cama Hospital and Jewish Headquarters. Read the Terror Roundup on IBNLive.

Incidently, I passed Vile Parle about an hour, if not less, before the blast hit. The taxi blew up below the flyover I had passed over.

The terrorists have taken people hostage at Taj Mahal Hotel, Hotel Trident as well as at Nariman House. Reports currently state that the hostage situation at Taj is resolved, though there are still several persons trapped in the building and it is believed that six terrorists are at large.

The last time we saw such an hostage situation was on Indian Airlines Flight 814 on Christmas Eve 1999.

Reported casualties are 101 killed and several hundred injured, including Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner Ashok Kamte, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and several police officials. However, I’m sure this is not the final count as police are continuing to find bodies in the hotels.

You can check out some photos of the attack on IBNLive.com or view their Live Streaming.

August is always a high-activity month with a huge number of birthdays and other occasions.

Freshers’ Party

After being postponed several times, the Fresher’s Party finally took place on August 6.

Dance parties aren’t really my favorite and this is usually no exception, especially when the DJ should pay for playing the trash he dished out!

Without doubt, I spent a good portion of my time outside the venue, which was the SIU poolside.

Food however, was better this time, with chicken added to the menu. Needless to say I ensured I ate well.

Below is a photo of me with my date and below that is a photo of five of us in our group.

The Birthday

On 12th, was Sumukhi’s birthday. She threw the party on Tamana rooftop for about 40 of us. Food for me was primarily chicken. (Did I tell you that I avoid vegetarian food?)

Another thing I avoid is dancing free style. I prefer ballroom, the little that I know! Here’s Sumukhi with the three of us roommates.

Anyway, Suchi was the DJ for a good portion of the time until yours truly took over the laptop. Spent the next 45 minutes making people dance! For serious wanna-be deejays out there, Virtual DJ is an amazing software. The demo version works very well for a 21 day period.

Among other stuff

Our area has been facing major power cuts. We had no power this weekend and a good portion of the time the generator was also switched off.

We decided to go off to the city. We had to shop for Sumukhi and also had good time to kill. Went over to Pune Central to shop for the same. IMO, the place is very badly designed and it was horribly crowded being a weekend.

After some shopping, we dropped into Little Italy next door. Little Italy is a completely vegetarian restaurant, but they specialize in pizzas and pastas, so I could survive! The food was decent, service was bad and bill was high

We tramped back into Pune Central after dinner and landed up in Food Bazaar at the top floor. Did some heavy grocery shopping, picking up apples, biscuits, corn flakes and juices. We’re realized it makes more sense to go out there once a week and pickup food instead of regularly visiting Sweety stores in campus.

Ohh, btw, I’m in Mumbai for the next few days

And, have you visited Techtites lately? There’s a new look and regular updates.

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.

Have been waiting a good deal and definitely didn’t expect it to land here so early, but as I mentioned my laptop arrived yesterday.

And as I was really anxious to get started on it, I called up Dell and asked them to send an engineer over today itself.

He came over and completed the installation and checked the entire system. Dell has a nice diagnostic CD that checks everything.

Windows Vista Home Basic Edition seems to be decent so far.

I was a little irritated that the C: is 100GB and the inbuilt shrinker didn’t work. It’s great that I will have (in another 12 hours) an external 120GB hard drive and a 2GB pen drive.

That’s a picture to the right. If you’re looking for more pictures, then check out this Flickr photoset and for those interested, the configuration.

Several months back I popped a question to my readers… Flickr Pro or Gallery 2?. I got a good response with people pointing me to both sides.

For me the question remained unanswered until now.

Bye Bye Gallery 2

A month ago, I knocked off my photo album which was powered by Gallery 2. Gallery 2 is an amazing software, but I didn’t have the time to actually maintain yet another site. I wanted to have a solution where I let someone else do the dirty work of running the gallery.

Yahoo! Photos?

Since knocking it off I’ve considered two options, the first was Yahoo! Photos. I love the interface of the new Photos beta. I’ve got my Dad to host his pictures out there. The in-browser tool works perfectly in Firefox, IE and Flock.

Picasaweb?

About a week back I started using Picasaweb after the storage for free users was increased to 1GB.

Picasaweb is good. The software is well featured, however I faced a big problem uploading photos. It could very well be my connection, since I haven’t seen reports of it elsewhere.

No it’s Flickr Pro

The turning point to Flickr came yesterday when Flickr introduced Collections.

Honestly, the only reason I was reluctant to use Flickr was the inability to create sub-albums. Yes I know in Web 2.0, we use tags, but I like things of Web 1.0 like sub-folders and sub-albums!

Now, you can put several sets into a single collection upto five levels deep (I need to figure out the sub-levels).

I picked up a two year Flickr Pro account yesterday and have immediately started the tedious work of uploading my photos. Until I figure out how to embed the collections and photos successfully on this blog, you can access the photos at http://photos.ajaydsouza.info/.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve got my eyes on two plugins, viz. FAlbum and Photos-Flickr. I had an unsuccessful attempt at using FAlbum on this blog yesterday. I kept getting an frob error.

I like Photos Flickr from what I see so far, however, it doesn’t have the ability to display sets and collections yet. It is based on phpFlickr and I’m currently studying the code to see if I can extend the plugin. My limited PHP skills have been an hindrance so far.

What happens to ajaydsouza.info?

I was hosting my old album at ajaydsouza.info. I plan on building a site on that domain dedicated to me! (I’m a narcissist).
Jokes apart, it will be a one stop site where you can browse to the millions of profiles I have all over. Am also planning on making it a place to “frame” all my work so far.

Let’s see how that turns out… until then it is pointing to my new Flickr Pro page.

Btw, if you are on Flickr add Ajay D’Souza or Ajay DSouza or ajaydsouza to your friends list.