At long last my vacation back home draws to a close. This time I had the opportunity of a much longer vacation since I had to take my core leave. Consequently I spent a good 18-19 days home

Lil white mouse came over this morning to spend the last few hours before I left for Bangalore. We took a rick to the airport. One stark difference about Mumbai and Bangalore airport is the security checks. Bangalore airport is a lot stricter (They didn’t allow me to carry my bottle of water past the security point!). For a change, am actually taking a good lot back to Bangalore and so had to improvise by carrying a bigger suitcase which I checked in.

At the check-in counter I was told that the flight will be delayed by yet another 20 minutes. This was in addition to the rescheduled 35 minutes. I usually reach the airport well in time, and so this meant a wait of over two hours

The two hours wait just got extended further when the flight actually took off post 9.20pm. The original booking was for 7.35pm. Go Air flight to Bangalore has been rescheduled to 8.10pm, so even then it meant a delay of well over an hour!

Had already rescheduled the Airlift cab that I had booked for 10pm to 11pm.

The last time I flew to Bangalore I noticed the well lit, extremely beautiful Mumbai skyline. I was a bit disappointed this time since I got a perfect view of the wing of the airplane mainly!

Grabbed dinner on the plane, since the next time I eat is for breakfast tomorrow.

Just had to pick up the one bag that I had checked in and rushed to get the cab. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it on time and had to take the 12am cab which got me home by 1.30am

I resume work in another few hours. A new day in the new year! Will just take the bike in to work tomorrow. Am hoping it is a short day!

Once again, I wish you a happy and prosperous new year. Keep on reading and if you haven’t already, do subscribe.

Christmas is the time of the year I’ve always looked out for. This year has been a very fulfilling year, which I shall write about in a future post. I took my core leave from 18 Dec to 3 Jan, which is the longest duration of leave that I have ever taken till date!

Had booked the tickets in August itself, so it was only the matter of getting to the airport. Unlike last time, where my cab arrived early and the plane was late, I reached the airport at 10am on Friday. They have become a lot stricter at Bangalore airport. I wasn’t allowed to even take my bottle of water past the security!

The flight was on time, but I didn’t get my usual row of seats. Was stuffed somewhere at the back, but the leg room isn’t that bad.

The flight was quick and I was home rather quickly and the first thing as usual was to reactivate my internet connection at home. This time my laptop is out of commission since I don’t have a spare internet connection.

Lil white mouse came over in the evening to spend some time with me.

On Saturday, I met up with Sneha, who had complimentary coupons for the ITC, where we feasted on a really good buffet. I ensured that I sampled all the meats and many of the deserts. (No vegetables for me!)

Went over to see the ENT in the evening. Have been suffering from a bad ear ache in addition to my usual nose trouble, so it was high time I got this checked. Also need to visit an ophthalmologist this time.

Went over to Lil white mouse’s place on Saturday and we watched Avatar on Sunday. Had booked the tickets for the 9.30am show at PVR, since they were a lot more affordable than the normal shows!

Returned home via Bandra. Got a lift from her and her family, who were on their way to Bandra. We took the Bandra Worli sea-link which was my first trip on the new bridge. It has been done well and looking up at the suspended portion at night is beautiful.

Spent the entire day at home today. Had a visit from Swagatika, who I met after nearly two and half years. Have a lot of catching up to do with a lot of friends!

For the past two years, I’ve made it a point to come down to Mumbai from Pune to celebrate both Lil white mouse’s and my birthday. Just because I was in Bangalore, it doesn’t mean I would let this change!

So, once again I booked my tickets via Go Air. However, this time it wasn’t a Rs.3,000 return as I got it last month. It was a full 2k more and well, it is well worth it!

I booked the Airlift, which is a really good investment when you are travelling to Bangalore airport which is a good 50+ km from city-limits. My mistake was that I booked the cab for 8am, which arrived earlier than that and I landed up at the airport about 9am! And, as luck would have it, my flight was delayed by a good 30minutes, so my wait at the airport was well over three hours, in which I spent a good amount of time in the Barista at the airport.

It was also interesting to watch people wearing masks all over the airport in fear of contracting H1N1 which seems to have ravaged the country! This was even more in Mumbai which is also one of the epicenters of the pandemic. In my opinion, the whole thing has been overhyped, since, there are more persons dying of other illness than the total suspected H1N1 cases. Anyway, some protection is better than none!

Being Independence day on the 15th, there was extra security checks at the airport. In fact, our luggage was checked twice. Once by the normal security and once by the Go Air personnel. On reaching the plane, there was a lot of confusion and I gathered some information that there was confusion about the number of passengers. We finally took off almost an hour late, but the flight was really smooth and we reached Mumbai rather quickly.

I dozed off on the flight when the exhaustion finally crept up on me! I landed at Mumbai airport and had to walk a small distance to get an autorickshaw guy willing to go by the meter and not trying to fleece me! Gosh! They think I am not from Mumbai!

Found a rickshaw guy home and I first stopped off at my local cable operator to renew the internet connection at home. Lil white mouse came over later in the afternoon to spend some quality time with me.

I went to meet Sneha afterwards and Arijit joined us for a quick dinner at Pizza Hut.

And, yesterday was Lil white mouse’s birthday celebrations. But, that’s for another post!

Simple Machines has just released a security patch for SMF.

This release addresses a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the search function.

The fix for the 1.0.x has been released as 1.0.9. The version number of 1.1RC3 has remained as is, but you need to download and update your SMF installation ASAP!

Just last week my forum was hacked. I’m not sure if this is the reason, but having your software vulnerable XSS is a sure shot way to getting hacked.

Read the complete release notification or download the latest version.

Direct Download:

Download the files below (you may need to be registered to the forum) and replace the files in your installation with the php files in the package.

updated_files_SMF_1-0-9.zip (102.59 KB)
smf_patch_1-0-9_1-1-rc3-1.tar.gz (1.99 KB)
updated_files_SMF_1-1-rc3-1.zip (179.11 KB)