Dune Buggy Safari

If you thought Dune Buggys belonged only to the desert areas of the middle-east, then think again. They are available even in Cyprus, where the tourists know of and come to visit only the beaches. We went on a one-hour Dune

Buggy Safari which was as good as driving quad bikes on the sand dunes in Dubai. We had to drive through narrow mountain tracks and for the second part of the safari, we happened to be at the back of the pack, which ensured that we were bathed in dust and mud! Check out more details and photos about the dune safari here.

Happy Ganesh Chadurthi

or Vinayagar Chaturthi as we tamilians refer to it. This year, Vidhya decided to get adventurous and perform pooja on a home-made Ganesha Idol.

So, out came the modelling clay, which was in cold-store for the past few decades and a model Ganesha. After an hour of some serious sculpting, with me in the background commenting about the inability of vidhya in comprehending art, a perfect, yes... a perfect ganesha idol emerged. I was amazed! So, i too wanted to get into the act and try my hand at clay modelling. But, i wasn't able to convince Vidhya that i wouldn't end spoiling the carpet, the cloth over the center table and everything else in the living room. I guess, my to-be-famous sculpture would have to wait a little more.

Submarine Trip to Xenobia Shipwreck

I must make a mention that the submarine I am talking about is the actual one which goes underwater, because in this part of the world, the mention of the word submarine/sub would conjure up images of mouth-watering footlongs and burgers.

I do not know to swim. I do not know even to float. I am not exactly hydrophobic, but I strongly believe a few feet of water is enough to drown me. So, when people go to bathe in the Mediterranean, here in Cyprus, I just about manage to step into the domain of the sea, maybe about a few feet inside, until i realise that I am far away (anything >5 feet) from the shore for anyone to come and rescue me, in case I start to drown. When Vidhya and I go for kayaking trips, a small wave (maybe a few cms high) is enough to rattle me and make me turn the kayak around and head for the shore. Even Vidhya pointing out that there are people standing next to me (while I am on the kayak) with water only until their tummys is not enough to convince me that I will not drown if the kayak overturns.

That pretty much sums up my experiences over-water. As regards underwater experiences, I have been brave enough on few occasions to try snorkeling. Unfortunately, since I limit my snorkeling experiences to a few feet from the shore, the only sights i have managed to see underwater are the legs of the bathers nearby and not any corals or other sea creatures!

This time, I decided to hand over my safety to a professional crew and went on a submarine excursion to the sunken shipwreck of Xenobia. This trip was from the coastal city of Larnaka and the wreck was at a distance of 2 kms from the shore. We were taken on a boat from the harbour and then were transferred to the submarine. When we first went into the submarine, the whole world looked upside down. We were looking at the surface of the sea above , from beneath its waters. This view took some time to "sink" in!

The sub started to descend to a depth of 12 meters, where the shipwreck was located. It looked like Titanic, straight out of the movie. The ruins of the ship, hundreds of fishes floating around and the divers exploring the wreck, the sight was awesome. At the end of the 45 minutes trip, i was very reluctant to leave the underwater world behind. Next time, I shall definitely try scuba diving to get a closer experience with the world underwater!

For more details and pictures of my submarine to the xenobia wreck, look here.

Sex does sell !

I am a rookie on Orkut and recently created a login there after receiving an invite from a colleague. When i started to explore the coomunities on orkut, I was surprised to see that most of the posts, irrespective of the community, were directly or indirectly related to porn. Either, there was a post distributing links to porn magazines or there were pleads from posters asking for links. So, i wrote a post yesterday on the pervasion of porn on orkut, and guess what, that page got so many hits yesterday from searches on google or on google blogsearch for the keyword "porn". So, sex does sell !
Maybe, i should write an entry talking about the two sexes i.e. male and female. This might lead to many hits for my site from people searching for the keyword "sex"!
Hmm.. I have a lot to learn on promoting my blog!

The New Blogger, with cool features - Review

On August 14th, Blogger went live with its new version in Beta. Well, its not yet completely available to all the existing blogs. Like all google products or acquisitions, this too is on a "entry by invite" basis. But, as they say, everyone should ultimately have access to it. But, if you can't wait to try out the new features on your existing blog, all you have to do is to create a new account and create a test blog, which is automatically linked to the newer version of blogger! This is what i did and I was impressed by the new features.

First and foremost,the dashboard looks different, with the basic tasks on a blog being available right on the dashboard. This eliminates the need to first go to a blog's admin page and then choose the action, if you maintain multiple blogs. Click to see a bigger picture.

So, i created a blog and made my first post. The "Create Post" screen has been modified to include an option for allocating labels for a particular post. No idea why Blogger took this long to implement this, as this has been available for long on other blogging platforms. "Labels" enable to categorize posts on your blog to enable easy access to your blog readers. For example, if you have a general blog, but also report about the quizzes happening in your city, you can categorize such posts under the label "quiz", so that readers can directly access all blogs related to the quizzes.

I created a "testing" label and created a sample post. I had chosen one of the many standard templates available. In fact, in this new version, lot of new templates are available as part of the standard templates.

Now comes the best new feature, that of customising templates and changing their appearance. Until now, if you wanted to change the look and feel of your blog, you needed to know some basic html or CSS to achieve the results. But now, you just need to know to use the mouse. Yes, as simple as that. With a few drag and drops, I was able to change the look of my blog, i.e. the way the different sections are organised. It would have been a monumental task to achieve this in the previous version. But, this takes out the fun of playing with CSS. My current site is heavily customised and it was a good learning experience for me to play around with CSS and change the code. But, i guess, it pays for blogger to provide such interfaces as not all bloggers would be interested in dirtying their hands with code. The new look with sections moved around (just a drag and drop of the mouse) is shown below

Doing the above modifications would involve copy-paste activities of CSS code, if you were to do it manually. But, if you wanted to change the colour-schema, you would have to spend lot more time in identifying where these definitions are made. No need for it now. Just go to the fonts and colors sections and control the colours of each and every individual aspect possible.

The new blogger has eliminated one more step in publishing the blog. In fact, now you don't need to publish the blog everytime you make a change in your settings. The moment you save the settings, blogger automatically publishes the blog, making it ready for viewing.

For the official blogger buzz on the new release, head over to The Blogger Buzz blog entry, where you can take a tour of the new features. Enjoy these features, as I am sure that these are going to make blogging an even more satisfying experience. Btw, news is that Wordpress is charging 15 Dollars for the facility to customise their blog templates. Blogger has always made customising templates available for free and now, they are providing tools to make that easy. Three cheers to Blogger!

Free porn at Orkut

If you are interested in links to porn magazines like playboy or penthouse, videos of the latest MMS scandals or even the illustrated version of the kamasutra, head over to Orkut and check any one of the popular cummunites like e-books, photography or even the hindu religion! At least, that is what it seems to be. Open any community page, look for the topic on the forum with the most number of replies (actually, anything more than 9), it is most probably someone posting the following:

"All Playboy Issues Till date...
Do u guys wnt this...
Just post your email Id's "

and there are a few hundred and in some cases, more than a thousand morons who just shoot their emails ids in the forum with a "grin" added at the end!

Some of the reply posts ..

"Waiting for it..please email it at ..."

"please please please send it asap"

"pleeeezzzzzzzz... make it fast... thanks"

Well, some are wary enough to have separate logins or use anonymous entries for such libidinous requests, while others, without caring about the rest of the world, publish their standard mail ids.

There are companies in the US of A who shell out thousands of dollars to get hold of email ids for their advertising campaigns and here we have a situation, where a simple mention of playboy or penthouse brings forth thousands of ids!

God bless these morons!

The 100 Rupee Quiz

After many hiccups because of the site servers being down , i have managed to release this quiz, as planned, on 15th August. I usually send quizzes through mail to quizzing groups like quiznet, qfi, quinkie, quizkrieg, greycells and few others. This time, i have taken a different approach and hosted it on my site and more than that, there is a also a prize for the topper. The prize is a hundred rupee gift voucher from Fabmall. Ya, it is not much, but a hundred rupees is a good enough sum to get some decent stuff at Fabmall. I plan to release a new quiz every month, hopefully.

There are 60 questions in the quiz. This quiz will be open until September 15th. It contains a mix of directs, connect questions and visuals and covers current affairs, sports, business, trivia and of course, the standard quizzing fillers. More details about the quiz on the quiz page. Enjoy the 100 Rupee Quiz and all the best.

New Photoshop Collage

Gopal repatriated to India after 5 years at Amdocs, Cyprus. He was one of our steadfast trekking companions on many of the good and sometimes dangerously stupid treks we have attempted. I created a collage of many of the photos we had taken on our trips together along with some of his photos from his Egypt Trip. I framed the picture and presented it to him as his farewell gift. I have done many more such collages for friends. I have posted them on my Photoshop page.

Thailand Photo Gallery has been uploaded

A new addition to my Gallery Section. I have uploaded many photos from my Thailand Trip. We went to Thailand around three years ago. It was an one month official trip and Vidhya also came along. The work was not much and I had all the weekends free. We roamed around a lot, including a visit to one of the islands in Thailand. We also visited Safari world (it got into controversy the following year for housing chimps illegally), where we had numerous close encounters with birds and animals. I hope the gallery inspires you to visit this wonderful country.

The fight for being India's Top Blogger

It all started when chenthil posted that Kiruba being India's Top Blogger was an Urban Legend and like most urban legends, this one too was untrue. This started off a heated debate in the Indian Blogosphere with bloggers taking either sides and some preferring to remain anonymous because of their vitriolic comments on the issue.

I believe most of the bloggers used this opportunity to express their jealousy for kiruba's popularity in the Indian Blogging community. No, I am not a supporter of Kiruba nor am i opposed to his blog. It is a fact that Kiruba is popular that, judging by the number of links to his blogs from other blogs. But, I guess , most of these links are in the hope that Kiruba links back to their site and thus, gain valuable exposure to their site. Even my site has been linked to by three other blogs (a little small compared to Kiruba's 275). Out of these three, one has always been defunct!

Patrix opines that there is no hard-and-fast rule to judge the popularity of a blog and gives an example using Technorati's rankings to put Digital Inspiration as one of the top Blogs. He also adds that even this ranking might not be foolproof and it is purely a matter of the "current event" which might make a blog appear popular.

WA jumps on the bandwagon and writes an interesting post, taking upon herself to judge the best indian blogger and in the process, providing me with links to many new blogs :-)

IndigoWarp has a small but to-the-point post on why he likes Kiruba's blog. His post prompted me to search for the post on Kiruba where he is shown trimming his toenails before a marathon :-)

So, what does it take to become India's top blogger or what does it take for one's blog to become popular? There is no definitive answer to this question as it largely depends on the kind of audience you expect on your blog or the ones you want on your blog. A blog is purely a personal medium to express one's thoughts to the external world and it may or may not be to the liking of people reading it. Kiruba has expressed this in reply to all the posts regarding his popularity or the lack of.

Of course, if your intention is to become a top blogger, you have to constantly adjust your content to suit the current trend of visitors on your blog. This takes lot of time and effort and may even reap rich rewards in the end, as can be seen from "Professional Bloggers" who blog their way to the banks.

I started blogging (if you call what i do as blogging), just because everyone i knew was doing it. It is a different matter that most of those people have stopped blogging after a few posts. What started as a blog for me turned into an elaborate exercise in maintaining a complete website. It was also an attempt at increasing my knowledge in html, css and other basics of building webpages. Even now, each of my pages are hand-written in EditPlus (of course, on top of the basic template page i created). Somehow, I never got to using any content management system or any other WYSIWYG editor. I just put on my website whatever i was interested in, like The Hunt (puzzles), Hindu Crossword Solutions, Travelogues, Photo Galleries, Photography Tips and Tricks, Photoshop work and even yesterday, i introduced a new section for my photoblog. Yes, i would like lot of people to read my blog/site, but all these were not created for the sake of others, but only as a realisation of my interests.

I read a lot of blogs, including Kiruba's. But, my concept of an interesting blog is slightly different. I read blogs for passing time, so i expect it to be an amusing experience. If it was current affairs or social/political issues that i was interested in, i would rather watch NDTV, CNN or any other news channel rather than reading a blogger's opinion on the same. So, i skip blogs which talk about such general issues. I like blogs which have humorous posts, like this one on vinod's blog, posts from which i can get a laugh and share the same with others. I also like to read photo journals and travelogues. I read Kiruba's blogs for his posts on his cycling trips or the marathon experiences and skip the podcast interviews from who's-who of some industry.

I am a regular at Chennai Central, not because he is one of the three nice guys to link to me, but because he often collates interesting posts and links to them. I also use his site and Kiruba's as a starting point for my daily blog-reading by using their huge blogrolling links.

So, if i were to judge the top bloggers based on the frequency of my visits, it would present an entirely different picture, contrary to public opinion. So, lets all leave this "top blogger" issue aside and continue blogging to please the masses in the hope that some huge MNC, someday buys out our website for millions of dollars!

Incidentally, "India's top blogger" anagrams to

• Bloating Ego Drips
• Bad, Losing Ego-trip
• God! Boasting peril
• Top Libido Naggers

Mind-B(l)oggling !

My New PhotoBlog

I had maintained a photoblog at livejournal much before i registered this domain. It went defunct when i started working on this site. I have a gallery section here, but it contains themed photos i.e. photos from a trip, photos of a kind etc. Now, I have started a new section which is a typical photoblog. I plan to add photos on a frequent basis with some info about each of them. The photos would be randomly picked from the good ones in my archive of about 15000 photos. Now, i have more than one daily section to update, the crossword page and this photoblog. Lets see how long i can last!

The mystery of ATMs

Nowadays, ATMs are part and parcel of our daily lives. In spite of that, we do get occasional surprises from simple activities such as withdrawing money out of an ATM. Today morning, i went to the nearest ATM to withdraw some money. There was a cypriot couple at the ATM and i could see that they were looking very worried and frantically discussing about something. This went on for few minutes as i saw the guy pressing all the buttons on the ATM, like what i do when i see any toy with buttons while shopping at the supermarket. Of course, the reactions were quite different from mine at the supermarket.

So, i offered to help, very well knowing that a Cypriot would not approach an Indian or any other non-cypriot for help and that i didn't have the entire day to wait for them to solve their problem. Neither this guy nor his companion knew english. The only english word they know was "card". This, along with his frantic hand waving, was enough for me to conclude that their card was stuck inside the ATM. I tried, in vain, in trying to know the cause for the problem, explaining to them about three attempts of wrong pin numbers, expiry of the card etc. Finally, i advised them to go to the bank (just behind the ATM) to get their problem solved.

Then, this guy asks his companion to do the same and so she leaves for the bank. But, this guy doesn't move from his place. I asked him to step aside so that i could withdraw money from the ATM. But, he gave me a worried look and said something which included the words "my", "card", "ATM" and he literally pushed me aside. I understood that he was worried that i was going to withdraw money out of "his" card and explained to him (showing the flashing green light), that the next person could use the ATM. But, whatever i spoke was greek and latin to him !

Then , his companion came out of the bank and called him inside. I took this chance and put my card inside and typed in the details. In the ATMs here, the card is completely drawn inside rather than the "swipe" ATMs i have seen back in India. Once my transaction was completed, the card started to come out of the ATM.

Let me go in slow motion. I put out my hand to take the card which was coming out the ATM. I almost grabbed the card, when suddenly, the whole section of the ATM where the card is taken in, started moving backwards inside the ATM. Well, my card was in that unit. So, i instinctively followed the piece back into the hole-in-the-ATM. I then realised this and pulled my hand back and bent down and peered into the hole. My eyes were met by another pair of eyes looking outside through the hole.

For a second, my days at BITS and my experiences at our computer center flashed before me. When i was in BITS, they were in the process of setting up a new computer center and in the early days of the center, there used to be many jokes going around that there really is a person sitting in the control room doing all the calculations, as the speed of the PCs were horrible. Then i thought, maybe there really is a person sitting inside all the ATMs counting and handing out the money!

Well, it was not to be so. The guy whose eyes i met, explained that he was the bank manager and that there was a problem with the ATM. All these explanations, through the hole in the ATM. I hope that no one on the road saw me talking to the ATM !