Plans to invade Cyprus?

Maybe not. If the US really had plans to invade cyprus, all they needed to do was to send one of the planes on this aircraft carrier and not the entire carrier to Cyprus.

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower was here in Limassol for the past two days. It seems that it was here for a routine port visit. Routine ? I have never seen an aircraft carrier here in Cyprus in the past five years i have been here. Maybe, US is planning to put its crafts within striking distance of Iran, just before the american general elections. Bush might earn some points because of this!

Yahoo says that this carrier visited Limassol as a "Thank you" gesture for the help rendered by Cyprus during the Lebanon evacuation. US is thanking Cyprus by bringing one its carriers to Cyprus! Nice. Maybe, it has an indirect effect on Cyprus Tourism during these four days. There might be many tourists who visit Cyprus just to catch a glimpse of 380 metre long, 24 storey tall monster.

Few years back, two Indian warships(INS Mysore and INS Godavari) had come to Limassol and were open to public visits. They even had Indian snacks made for all the visitors. The port is around 100 metres from the amdocs offices and a lot of us had been there on the ships. Even at that time, there was a joke going around that India had plans to invade cyprus and had sent two of its smallest ships over here! Well, Cyprus defence is not an easy force to be dealt with. They have very fast Jet-Skis to patrol their shores and they also have planes with extremely low-altitude-flight capability, the ones that are used to spray pesticides over farms. Imagine their destructive power, as the bombs the pilots can throw out of their cockpits can be extremely accurate from such small heights.

Technorati Tags: cyprus limassol aircraft+carrier USS+Dwight+D.+Eisenhower INS+Mysore INS+Godavari

Diwali Party in Cyprus

The party season has just begun in Amdocs. The End of Summer party happened early September and now we had the Diwali Party.The Romanian Party is planned next month and then we have the New Year Party. Looks like we have a busy few months ahead!

The Diwali Party this year was the biggest ever in amdocs in terms of the programmes and also in terms of the budget involved. This year, the party was help at Monte Caputo, the biggest and one of the best auditoriums in Cyprus. Monte Caputo is located at the top of a hillock by the sea. This is a professional auditorium known for hosting television events and other international music shows. Usually, our Diwali Party is held at a traditional hotel, where we had to get along with make-do stages and crappy lighting and audio systems. We were in for quite a shock, when we went for a dress rehearsal to Monte Caputo, for the lights/sounds guy gave us innumerable options for lighting during the various programmes and we left the decisions to him rather than get involved and get confused!

We usually have a fireworks show during the New Year Party. This was the first time we had one at the Diwali Party and what a show it was. Rumour is that the price tag went into thousands of dollars! The fireworks show went on for many minutes and it finished with a "Happy Diwali" banner made out of sparklers!

It was the biggest Diwali Party ever and i went without my camera! I still haven't got my camera's flash repaired after it fell and broke during the End of Summer Party. So, i am restricted to day-light photography until then. Of course, this doesn't prevent me from taking photos of fireworks and lightning, but i didn't want to carry it to the party just for this.All the photos in this post are from other amdocs' employees and i have tried to select a lot which shows the magnitude of the party. Click on the pictures to see a bigger resolution image. Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: cyprus diwali+party amdocs monte+caputo fireworks New+Year+Party dance Happy+diwali

Why doesn't Blogger Auto-Save?

It's not once or twice that i have lost a big post due to the connectivity to Blogger being lost. After i spend time typing a big post, I press "Publish Post", then i get an empty page. When i use IE's "Back" option to go back, I am greeted by an empty post! Very good ! Now I have to type it over all again ! The post does not even appear in the "Edit Posts" Section.

Why doesn't blogger auto-save a post every few minutes or whatever gmail does? Sometimes, blog posts are written with interest and when you have to do it all over again, i just cannot get the same enthusiasm.

I remember an incident which a friend narrated to me. They had been to one of Doordarshan's junk school quizzes. After around one hour of filming the quiz, the director/cameraman suddenly noticed that one of the cameras didn't have any film in it. So, they had to replay the entire quiz. So, what they did was watch the quiz (recorded by the other camera) and enact it out exactly like that i.e. if a team had said a wrong answer, they did the same and they even had to give the same jubilant reactions when they had gotten the correct answer. So, in the end, their acting as well as quizzing skills were put to test!

Blogger, please do something ..I don't want to exercise my brain too much!

Technorati Tags: blogger gmail auto-save quiz

Onset of winter in Cyprus

Winter, followed by Spring, are the best times to be in Cyprus.Of course, the average Britisher might disagree as the best time for "them" to be in Cyprus is summer when the temperature is close to the 40s (Deg C) and they can roam around half-naked on the beaches.

Lets forget them and look at the rest of the world for a change. Cyprus winters are mild and you can even be out on the streets at midnight without the fear of getting frostbite. It rains and sometimes it pours. But, that is what adds to the beauty of Cyprus. Cyprus turns green during late winter and spring, when the troodos snow starts to melt and you have numerous streams in full flow. I don't know of many places where you can ski on the mountains and go for a dip in the sea on the same day. They are just 40 Kms apart.

For the amateur photographer, this is the best season in Cyprus. The Sun is not so bright, even at noon and with a "sky-blue" sky interspersed with clouds of different shapes, what more could one ask for. A rainbow sighting used to be a rare occasion for me back in India, but here, almost all showers are followed by a rainbow. Dark clouds always pose a good photo opportunity. Below are some if the photos taken by my colleagues from our office building yesterday and also some which i had taken over the past few years.

Technorati Tags: Cyprus Winter Spring Sunset Rainbow Yermasoyia

Filed Under: Photo Cyprus

My site is finally stable!

After almost a week of struggling to get all the files transferred from my previous host, I have managed to upload most of my files, most importantly, the 100 Rupee Quiz and "The Hunt" files onto the server.

Still, i have many sections, mostly the images of my photoblog, left to be uploaded. The problem is that my current host doesn't offer the facility of uploading files through a Web-GUI and enforces only a FTP transfer. FTP transfer is blocked at work. So, I have to transfer all my site's files back home and then upload them through dial-up!

If you (the few regular visitors my site has) find any broken links, do drop in an email to me so that i can correct those.

Moved to Hagen Hosting

I have moved my domain from the free hosting offered by Guru to a paid Hosting Plan by Hagen Hosting. One of the main reasons was that since Guru had offered me free hosting, i could not trouble him a lot when the servers were down.

I am in the process of transferring all the files. So, you might find just the content of the posts (from blogger), but not the images(which are yet to be transferred). So, please bear with me until then :-)

If you are also participating in "The Hunt", all the pages have not yet been uploaded. They will be done by this weekend.

Try this very interesting flash game

Play this Game here

I have decided to KISS!

Keep it Super Simple, that is !

Going to change my template extensively and remove the menu images seen throughout the page. These menu images are placed through absolute positioning in CSS and go all over the place when viewed on different resolutions. So, I am going to put text links in their place and keep them within the main body so that they don't move around independently.

So, if you see a screwed up page, kindly adjust and come back after a few minutes. This is to the "n" (can be counted on the fingers of one hand) regular visitors to my site :-)

Navratri in Cyprus!

It was Kholu time and that meant I had pick up my lazy self and start moving around all the heavy

stools and tables in our house to make the steps for the kholu to be kept on. I also had to get all the old camera and shoe boxes and solve the three-dimensional jig-saw puzzle with them to get a smooth finish to the bottom few steps of the kholu.
If this wasn't enough strain on me, vidhya wanted to create a park this time and so, I had to visit various beaches and collect samples of different-coloured sand. I thought my work was done with this, but i didn't realise that Vidhya had only planned to plan the park and leave the execution to me! So, down i went, on my knees to get my hands dirty.
We started out ambitiously with plans of having a mountain range (troodos in Cyprus) on one corner, the Mediterranean sea on the sides and undeveloped countryside (akamas in Cyprus) on the other corner. Soon, we came to realise that having the sea would prove to be too difficult without flooding our living room. So, we just simulated the sea with sandy beaches and left the rest to the viewer's imagination.

Next, we wanted snow on the mountain. We thought of various ideas including cotton/white paint/flour, but finally vidhya came up with the idea of using "Surf" which gave a great look with blue flakes in the middle of the white powder!
I had to prepare the houses/huts which were to be placed randomly. I had a great productivity rate of around 1 house an hour. Imagine having to cut 2 rectangular pieces of chart paper and then folding them to make a house. It is lot of work! Vidhya didn't realise it and was forever chiding me for working slowly.
Finally, we got some real as well as artificial plants to embellish the "forest" and our park was done!

Technorati Tags: Cyprus Navratri Kholu indian+festival

Filed under: India Cyprus

End of Summer Party at Amdocs

Few weeks back, we had the End of Summer Party here in Amdocs. This party is usually scheduled around mid-September when the weather cools down a bit and all the drunken and semi-naked britishers start to leave the island. So, amdocs organises a party where all can get drunk!

This time, for a change, the party was held in a discotheque and not in a hotel. And the most surprising part, there were no belly dancers! The location was cool, with a pool in the middle. Luckily, in spite of the free flow of alcohol, no one managed to fall into the pool!

This time, we had organised a Fashion Show, done by only the managers. This was a big hit with the crowd, as the managers managed to enthrall the crowd with their antics in stage, much more than what was rehearsed! We had chosen the themes of Traditional, Formal, Casual, Sporty, Hawaiian, Hippie style and finally Men in Black. The most difficult part was to get 20 odd senior managers to come for rehearsals after office time for 3 consecutive days!

The "relatively" small discotheque location kind of forced everyone to dance and people were dancing until the wee hours of the morning. One of the best parties in amdocs i have attended until now !

Technorati Tags: amdocs party summer+party belly+dancer cyprus manager Fashion+show

Don't speak in Tamil at American airports

A man was questioned because he was found to be suspicious by another passenger who heard him speaking Tamil on the phone.

So, from now on, don't ever speak in Tamil at American airports or else be ready to face consequences like our Mr.Jagannathan Ramamoorthy did !

JR(on a phone with his friend Y) : hi ..jack pesaran da! evening plan enna macchi ?

Y: Enna paruppa ..eppolendhu jagannathan jackachu ?

Paranoid American 1 (PA1) : Oh my god! He is planning to hijack the plane.

X: jagan sonnalum intha naatu karanga purunjikka mattengaranga ..jogan , jaagan ..ishtakku kolapanranga!

PA2: Holy Shit ..this guy has 3 guns with him !

Y: Naanum somasundaratha samnu change pannikalamnu irukken ...

X: btw, enna matter ? kelvi patten unnoda assistant "sue" va side la connect pannindrikkenu ?

PA1: In the name of Jesus! He is planning to commit suicide after hijacking the plane!

Y: atha onnu illa machi ..sue vandhu bombay poga pora vacationukku, so konjam tips ketundha ..

X: bombaya? unnakku enna bombay pathi enna theriyum ?

PA2: he also has a bomb with him !

Y: hey ..ennaku bombayum theriyum hindiyum theriyum !

X: seri ..evening varil time eppidiyathu time kill panren ...ok ..apparam pappom bye ..

PA1 & PA2: He is planning to kill everyone with a time bomb ! Lets alert the cops !

Later, the American cops got the transcript of the conversation by contacting the FBI, who in turn contacted Orange (The telephone company) , who in turn contacted NASA to get the login to log on to the satellite through which the communication had gone through, who in turn contacted their help desk from where the call was routed to Sriperumbudur in Chennai, where Srinivasan Kumaraswamy logged on to the server and recorded the actual conversation.

Jagannathan had to give a word-by-word translation of his conversation and he found it hard to convince the American cops that somasundaram was not actually his brother-in-law when he had referred to him as machi !

Moral of the story: When in America, do as the Americans do. Always go around with a xtra-large Milk Shake in one hand and a triple burger in another and keep talking about democrats and Republicans!

Technorati Tags: tamil Indian NRI

The October 100 Rupee Quiz

The October edition of the 100 Rupee Quiz has been uploaded. I planned to release this on October 2nd, but due to some work constraints, it got delayed by a day. 35 Questions to be cracked and 100 Rupees to be won.
Enjoy the Quiz here.

You can also check the answers of the September edition of the quiz.

Technorati Tags: quiz 100+Rupee+Quiz October+Quiz