Level 4 – the unofficial lonelywanderer.com adventures

I am not affiliated with the actual site. But I guess there are some good photography available there to publicly view, albeit a little old.

The usage of lonelywanderer.com this (unofficial) way kind of hit my mind when I realized that it was absolutely pathetic travelling via train to chennai (from calicut) especially during the holiday season with no reservation. Of course I should have done the reservation first a long time ago, but I somehow didn’t. Therefore I was rampantly finding out other means of getting to Chennai. Finally I chose to take the bus. And as most of you may know there are no direct bus services to chennai from calicut.

So yesterday after a bit of asking around learned that the best way to reach chennai was to somehow reach Coimbatore, and from there take either the train/bus. (Again, the former choice was a bad one). But unfortunately the frequency of buses to Coimbatore from Calicut is very rare. If I remember correctly theres only 2 services - in the morning and night. It was somewhere around 2.00 pm when I learned this…

Okay so how do I reach Coimbatore?

One of the state transport drivers told me to take the private bus to Palakkad. There are services to Coimbatore from there regularly from there. So I boarded one such bus. And this was my first journey to that place. Feel asleep most of the way though. I for some reason kept thinking that this bus had to go via Thrissur, Ernakulam, etc. Calicut to Ernakulam is a 5 hr journey. But after a late realization, I figured out that these buses fork at Ramanaatukara; it takes the road from there which goes to the Kozhikkode airport, Malappuram, Perintalmanna, etc.

And thus I finally reached Palakkad at around 7pm. To make it to coimbatore however you had to find the state public transport bus stand. No idea of the frequency of buses to coimbatore from there. Heck, no idea where the state transport bus stand was either…! After a little asking & walking around I finally found the state transport bus stand.

It was around 7.15 pm. The 1st thing I saw when I entered the station was a bus to coimbatore completely packed with people. Okay now when is the next bus? Is it the last one? If not when is the last one?! I went and enquired for the station master. Noticed that even the buses for Tiruvananthapuram (or Trivandrum) were packed, and people waited in queue hoping to catch the next bus for a seat. Looking at the passengers inside I told my self ‘God bless India’. (Even though I know I’ve not seen the worst – God bless India).

The station master was a patient fellow. He answered my queries patiently. So the last bus was at 10pm; buses were frequent – 1 every 10 min; it takes hardly 1h 15m to reach coimbatore. It was only 7.30 pm. So I thought it was best I dine. Had a very quick dinner; quickly visited the public urinal, and then headed towards the queue where people waited for the coimbatore bus.

[This post is intentionally a series…to be continued…as I cannot write everything in one stretch]
[Edit: Click here to read the next]

Pulicat and Tada Trip

Went on a trip 2 pulicat lake n tada falls last sun (13th Dec). Rented out a car n made our journey. 5 different paths converged that day. 4 of them repressed with the corporate life. (me, sitaram, jerry & ashwin). The last 1 was prob sick of eating too much sea food - ganesh, sita's cousin, the marine engineer.

Our 1st stop was Pulicat which is about 50kms from chennai. Initially we thought we'd take our bikes for a ride, but then due to uncertain weather forecasts we ended up hiring the car just to be safe. The pulicat lake is 1 which adjoins the sea (the bay of bengal). Its a huge lake. There are many islands streching the mouth of the lake. We rented out a boat, and parked near on one of these secluded spots. All of us brought clothes esp 4 swimming, but nev had 2 use it. We were just happy 2 mke it in2 the waves with just our jockeys, frenchies, vips, n other unpopular brand of underwear.

Sita made me taste the bay of bengal; I think this was first time too! Ashwin collected a lot of shells. (He also made some pretty decent credit card debt collection calls from his cell phone). Even I had some shells stuck 2 my body; they must have thot I was a coral reef or sumthing! I and Jerry did wht we do best everyday in the office...wrote SQL queries...on the beach! Well he wrote SELECT * FROM TABLE. I as usual, compiled that statement and wrote Syntax wrong. Screw u!

All of us were exhausted after a dip in the bay of bengal. On the boat ride back, we took photos of the scenery, the lake, and the birds. The pulicat lake is known as a place of rest various migratory birds. You'd see all sort of these birds during the month of May which is touted to be the actual season to visit the place.

We did take some explicit photography of ourselves there while on the boat. These photos are available online. We have branded certain pages appropriately (as lite and full versions) (pun intended).

After the ride back to land we visited some Dutch tombstones. (This place was once a Dutch settlement too). There is a grave yard; its entrance gate leads you through an arch. There are sculptures of 2 skeletons there, adorned with some Dutch writings. One of the skeletons is ready to welcome you to the cemetery. I wanted to take a picture. But the scene was probably too scary for the camera film.

We were totally exhausted after the dip in the ocean. And...as if all that wasn't enough we headed straight to tada falls. The tada falls is again about 40kms from pulicat; somewhere after the Andra border. This was my first experience trekking. You have to do about 3kms of trekking to witness the actual falls. When we reached the place it was almost evening. We couldn't make it upstream as it required too much climbing. But fortunately there was a place downstream where we could take a bath.

Warning: unless you want to bang your head, and consequently suffer from amnesia, please do not take a dive head first into the stream. The bed is rocky, and the water is freaking cold! But it was damn refreshing; we were all so energized after the dip in the stream.

We were exhausted again after the trek back to our ride. And then we slowly returned to chennai. On our way back we were famished. We spotted a punjabi dhaba on our way back. (some 40 kms from chennai). The five of us feasted around 47 chappathis in total. Dinner there was exquisite, and lovely. We occupied those traditional cots they'd provided. This was my first and best experience eating from a dhaba.

After having dinner Ashwin, was seriously thinking of a change in profession. He wanted to take a 2-day internship from this place; come back to chennai, and start a dhaba on his own. I wonder if you are lost & stuck with this guy in a forest, he probably setup a dhaba there too...

When we reached Thirumanglam, our car gave off. The front tyre punctured. Hey something bad had to happen. It was a 2007 alto we rented. Guess when we returned it became a 1997 maruthi...Fortunately we were in a busy town area. We approached a nearby cycle repair shop and asked if they'd fix a punctured car tyre; thus the car was fixed soon.

Overall, this trip was fun; it was a celebration of life. And we all look forward to having more adventures like this...

PS: more photos to be uploaded soon. Keep checking the feeds for the same link

New horizons & concerns

2 posts on the same day!!! Someone must be thinking that I am making up for my relative absence in the blogsphere.

Well I am not so absent! I am on twitter most of the time. And might continue to remain so if twitter doesn’t get blocked in my office anytime soon. Recently I find that I cannot be on twitter as frequently as I used to.

The reason: caught up with some work, away from my pc most of the time, and my mobile internet sucks. But mainly its work. It is researching new stuff, doing some web sites, etc. All of this because I have become a full-time developer in the ofc. Got recently designated as a sr. programmer.

I’ve done a couple of projects that has got me thinking about what is required to keep the show running from a continued production standpoint. You just can’t do the development and cut the ribbon for production to commence. You have to virtually be there all the time, even if it annoys those who have higher stakes in running the show. This is just another facet of the call center life – one that is not bragged about mostly.

But life is not without its share of criticisms and prejudices. I don’t know whats the road ahead. But who does? Life is still going to be like a coconut that fell into the river stream. It can only go where the currents take it to.

PS: borrowed those words from an education seminar I attended way back while I was in school. Still true today wrt students who do engg/medicine counseling.

Router Consequence

Got a new credit card and all. They said that I had to spend something above Rs. 1000 to activate that crap. And I was looking forward it. I figured I wasn’t so indulged into the world of credit cards; so why not venture into it.

So my thoughts were instilled with what to buy for myself that would cost around that much? I thought of buying a titan watch. So I visited ebay.in, checked out on the prices, fixed a budget, and was prepared to make the purchase. Had a model and an appropriate price in mind too.

I shouldn’t have done that

I went to the titan showroom in velachery, and was disappointed to know that the model I had in mind was not there and the price was not what I expected it to be. ebay sells things cheaper! And then I was focused on buying a watch from ebay itself. Then as I saw all the models; titan was not really my style. I mean it wasn’t what I liked. There were cheaper watches that looked even better! Classic! May be prosaic, but classic.

The only dilemma was how am I supposed to spend Rs. 1000 with a watch which costs much lesser than that…?

At around that time (i.e. the same week), my room mate was demanding that we somehow share the internet connection we had. He had a modem splitter in mind. But I wasn’t too sure of it. We asked the broadband customer service if this was a good solution; they said it could cause network problems. It looked like a small device almost like a telephone socket. My room mate was suggesting we don’t buy anything too costly. But my mind was somehow fixed on buying the router. It would save us the headache.

So I went on ebay again, looked up at the prices. I was going to buy it from some shop in velachery itself. I was hoping to achieve a good bargain. And again the prices were dismally too high. Damn, ebay sells better and cheap! Out here most wireless routers start from Rs 2000. The non-wireless routers were priced around Rs. 1600. On ebay the same wireless router I looked at cost only Rs. 1500. Plus, shipping and that came up around to Rs. 1600.

I thought to my self, ebay it is… Thus I have ended up with a wireless router. And I used my credit card to pay for it too. Lets see how the bill haunts me though…

Because of my routers wireless capabilities I used my broadband connection to connect to the internet via the browser in my mobile phone. Gmail, and twitter mobile sites downloaded in a swish! It is awesome. I had downloaded some cool apps from the nokia ovi store for my mob (nokia 5800). It would have taken eternity if I had connected to the site and downloaded with the internet connection provided by my mobile network (aircel). Plus, now my room mate can sit and do his research for online stock trading and stuff and I can do my research and blogging at the same time.

This wasn’t my first purchase from ebay though. I purchased a clipper for my dad. In the end, I don’t know, a simple credit card ended up making me buy everything off ebay.

Clumsy Gadget

Well, one night I was sitting and doing something on my comp when suddenly my room mate calls and says, there was an earthquake in our office! At first I blurted wha?!!! His ofc is on the taramani rd; not really that far if you go on a bike. I never noticed anything, and I didn't believe it was an earthquake at first.

Well some tweeters from chennai did post about experiencing mild tremors and the sorts. Thats when I confirmed there had been a tremor. I live on the ground floor so I couldn't feel anything. Mostly people living in high-rise buildings would have felt the vibrations. And if I am correct it was because of an earthquake in Andaman or somewhere near the coast of Japan.

That twitter search page came in handy for this particular event. The neat thing about it is the real-time info - the minute I post something, if you search for it, its there. However this was not the first time I've used twitter search. Remember the time when the news channels & papers announced there were about 7 deaths in chennai due to swine flu; I did actually think if finding out if people going to work were wearing masks!

Nevertheless, I found the thing useful to a certain degree. Then I wanted to keep track of such trends. In order to make this task easier I thought I get a iGoogle gadget designed to do so. I couldn't find the perfect one. So I built one. It is not so perfect, but it is more or less real-time. At least the posts will keep updating.

If you looking to add this gadget in your igoogle page there are a couple of things to do. First go to the page where you usually go to add stuff (click on the Add stuff link in your igoogle page). If you look closely there is a link which says Add feed or gadget. If you click just paste the url given below, and click on the Add button

http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/115976558690780681327/the-twitter-search.xml

If you are lucky this should work else you'd get a message saying not found. I don't have a solution to that as of yet. But if that happens I can suggest some workarounds.

PS: anyone is welcomed to change the look & feel of that app. If you ever decide to do so just preserve the 'by deostroll' part.