Been long....

"Been long since my last update" - It has been my opening line for most of my recent updates! That shows how hard I am working (heh heh, for once, it is true!)
There were a few people visiting from the client place so had to be well prepared. Gave me an idea of how much I really know on the product as well! Was an eye-opening session as in always struggling to keep the eyes open (just joking, it wasn't that bad also!) :-D
Another new interest is Orkut - its for some weird reason, blocked from our office servers! So once in a while, access it from home. Once I had access to broadband, started orkut-ting (new adjective?) from home. A friend told me your worth is known by the number of scraps you get for your profile - well in that case, any girl would beat me hands down (they literally beat me in any case though :p) with all their "Hi, you are beautiful. Can we be friends" scraps!! Am not complaining - just an observation!
But yeah, Orkut's really the place to find old, long-lost friends and acquaintances. You can spend like hours together looking for people and finding them as well! Pretty neat!
Connected trivia - Did you know orkut means 'orgasm' in Finnish? The creator of Orkut, Orkut Büyükkökten, is Turkish. Just a chance maybe that his dad had taken Finnish classes during his naming ceremony? ;-)
From Wikipedia:
As of March 2006, with 72.72% of orkut's members were from Brazil, followed by 10.92% from the United States, 2.61% from India, 2.43% from Iran and 2.28% from Pakistan.
Another interesting thing I am into is Google PageCreator http://pages.google.com. Got an account recently and got to see what good can I make of it! Google just keeps coming out with these variety of tools each passing day! Well, its sounding like an ad-byte for Google now! But man, I really admire that company for the stuff they come out with!


Then, there were major Holi celebrations outside our office where we caught unsuspecting colleagues on their way home and (with their permission) colored them all over! Here is a pic from then. Try figuring out who is who (that is, if you know anyone at HCL EAI/Aal other than me :p)


















For Ugadi, we had Ethnic day in office. There was considerable enthu shown by the junta out here, though most guys showed up in the ubiquitous kurta pyjama, while a few were in real wacky stuff! Like Siva who had come dressed as a traditional Tamilian with dhoti/shirt complete with vibhuti (sacred ash) on his forehead and Tejabhai who was dressed in a pure silk shirt and dhoti and looked like a character right out of these early-90's Telugu movies! I went dressed in a complete Kodava outfit, accompanied by a dagger and a fake pearl necklace as well. Though am not Coorgi, took the liberty considering Mangalore is neighbour-of-Coorg ;-)
Question - Is Ugadi pronounced as You-gadi or Oo-gadi? Which is the correct one? I guess the first one is the Anglicised version?
If interested, check some pics from ethnic day out here - Click on this (needs a registration but pretty good photo-site). It was good fun all day. We had a few clients visiting and one of them, an American, was pretty impressed with all the costume. I surely would have reminded him of Halloween though!

April 1st was a Saturday so not much scope of fooling anyone. The only person I ended up fooling was myself! The clock had stopped ticking at 1045AM and I slept all the way upto 1500PM thinking it was still 1045!! And I must have looked at the clock maybe 3-4 times stuck at the same time without realising that!
Spent rest of the day watching MTV Bakra where Cyrus did a recap of all the old Bakras they had carried out. Some were truly hilarious! Like the Parthiv Patel one! Was genuinely funny!

Next on is a trip to Ooty on the famous narrow gauge train (or more famously, the Chaiyya Chaiyya train). Let's see when it happens!

Finally, the main road to our office seems to be getting done! Guess the BCC finally realised 80 Feet Road doesn't mean 80 feet deep but really means 80 feet wide!

Listening to Bent by Matchbox Twenty! Yeah, really a mad season!