Merry Christmas

Its that time of the year when you just feel the holiday spirit. Last year I played Santa in office and exchanged gifts. In true Christmas spirit Santa didn't get any. But the whole event was quite a bit of fun.

This year we are in Kumta for Christmas. It also happens to be my inlaws wedding anniversary today. There's plenty of sea food on the menu and maybe a long drive along the beach in the evening.

I have never been able to concentrate on work in the last week of the year. Either its the planning for the New Years get-together or its the holiday spirit in office & with the vendors. This year its both.

New Years is going to be with some old friends and their kids. So it will be some good fun over 2 days. The location is a good 60 kms away from Mumbai nestled in the Khopoli forest.

Happy Holidays!

Fish platter in Goa

We had no idea how much of fish would be there in a fish platter when we ordered one for dinner. We were at Ritz Classic in Panjim, a place we have frequented in the past years whenever work has brought us to Goa.

Considering it was pitiable that we were in Goa on work rather than pleasure, especially at this time of the year, we decided to splurge a little on sea food. Well the little was a bit too much.

A normal platter would at best get you @ 12 to 15 pieces of meat. This one came with more than 30, not counting the prawns & the squid. I missed carrying the camera else it would have made a lovely photo post.

There was Pomfret, Surmai, Bombil (Bombay Duck), Chonak (a local fish), Rawas, Bangda (Mackrel), Prawns, Squid and 2 more varities which were unidentifiable but tasty nevertheless. The two of us could do justice to only 3/4th of the platter.

I would highly reccomend it but with a gang of at least 4 people & you should be able to polish off the platter easily. It is priced at a weird 267 bucks. A downright steal.

A memorable dinner indeed.

Data Management

This is the 3rd laptop I am moving to this year. I moved to the company paid HP Pavilion TX1000 series from my personal Sony Vaio in June. I got my replacement of the lost laptop last evening. Its the same TX series.

Each time I have spent hours trying to build my data, which is huge. I have several email accounts, many rules on as many folders in Outlook, standard bookmarks and whole lot of addon softwares like Firefox, Google desktop, Picasa etc. To say it has been boring and frustrating is an understatement, not to mention loss of productivity.

There is too much data which keeps getting changed or updated and its impossible to keep a track of the backups. Files & email are easy but bookmarks, outlook rules etc need to be constantly backed up and there's no single tool which takes care of it all.

We sure have landed in the age of information overload. God knows whats in store ahead.

Losses

This is the first time ever I have lost something so valuable, on my own.

I have lost my Timex Indiglo, my Ray Ban & my iPod at different times but all have been stolen in some or the other form. BTW my bag contained my iPod too, so there goes my 2nd iPod.

Honesty & Decency are long dead and buried and you only hear rare cases of things returned by sincere people. So I had no hope of getting my bag back. But what amazes me is that the generation before us never loses hope and sincerely believes in some divine intervention which will return any lost good.

There have been numerous prayers offered by loved ones, all of them for my lost bag and for a moment I really thought that it may work. But GOD has different plans.

Thankfully I have been at peace ever since I was told that insurance will cover most of the losses. The rest will be funded by some of my stock market gains.

So as the adage goes..paisa aata hai..paisa jata hai..Money comes...Money goes.

Come Monday, I will be busy trying to get my material world back on track.

Holiday Woes

The week long break to Kumta started on a bad (disastrous) note. I forgot my laptop in the train while getting down at Kumta at 4 in the morning. I realised only after I woke up at 9 in the morning.

All efforts to get it back were in vain. My cousin even went to Mangalore station to see if anything could be done. And the loss was not only of the laptop. My haversack had my wallet with my driving licence, my credit cards and cash and my digital camera too.

Though I was a bit nervous initially but I cooled down after a while since there was nothing much we could do. Fortunately my office folks should be able to claim the insurance since we managed to file a FIR at the local police station.

My brother managed to block all my cards. So next week is going to be co-ordination & getting back to normalcy week.

Till then I am going to relax and try and make the best of the holiday. Thanks to my new phone and a blazing GPRS connection I am connected!

More later

iPhone yearnings

The more I see the iPhone the more I yearn for it. But the more I play with my Nokia E Series and the myraid applications on it, the yearning dies down.

I love the Gmail App, Fring and the Moneycontrol application.

But I will move to the iPhone eventually. There are rumors that it will be launched in India in January.