Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A journey across Orissa: The state of Temples
back from orissa... temples , religion, devotion, more temples, sea, sun temple, sunrise, konark, puri, olive ridley turtles, seamouth, chilka lake, long drive, train journey, long night in the train, gossiping, awesome tiger prawns :D, singhada, roadside food, boat ride, lazyass dolphins...and some more temples!! My tag cloud for the trip
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Kingfisher Experience: Going to South Africa
Well here I was, along with my friends Shriyash and Partha, whiling away time at the Extreme Sports Bar, Shriyash had a bus to catch. What better way to wait then by guzzling a bit of beer? So that explains how we got to XSB. While in there, as soon as we ordered some beer, we were approached by Kingfisher crew asking us to just fill out some form, which as it turned out to was for the 'Hunt for the King' contest. We filled the form and handed it over. As we were lounging and looking on to the IPL match being played before us, we suddenly heard our names being announced over speakers! Happily surprised, we went over and found that there were around ten people against whom I'd have to 'compete'. Till date I have not understood whether it really was a competition afterall?
We started with a beer drinking game, I came 4th out of 5 people. Happy with the free mug of beer that we got to drink, we got back to our seats. As we were finishing up, we heard our names being announced a second time!Having lost the first round, this was a definite surprise. We went across another time, and this time all the contestants had to dance it out to impress a bunch of girls. Guess what? My turn came and I danced. I am not too shabby a dancer but then again I hadn't danced in a while. So, when the vedict came, I got a mere 2.5/5 from the girls(out of the 5 girls, 2 had liked me, and one was undecided :P). Once again, happy to have lost, we got back to our table and finished our food etc. Now this first guy had to catch a bus, remember? So we made to leave, paid our bill and were about to leave when there was an announcement for the next round contestants. My name wasn't in that list. Although, Partha's name was in the list, we informed the Kingfisher team and left as we were getting very late already.
Saturday- 8th May, 2009
I received a call from someone from Kingfisher who informed me that I was a finalist for 'Hunt for the King' contest. You can imagine my shock at this news, of course. I had fared badly in the two rounds that I had played and didn't even make it to the third!
Anyways, I decided to go to the finals, to be held in Bottles and Chimneys, Begumpet. I was told to be there by 7.00PM and I got there by 7.30PM due to traffic. There I was greeted by the host, Maryanne, who was quite polite and asked me a few questions about myself.
The contest started around 9PM, finally, I guess everything happens on IST(Indian Standard Time) only :P
Well, of course they didn't just keep us waiting there. Around 8.00PM, we were shown to a table and were told that we could order anything and it'd be taken care of by Kingfisher :D.
We started with a beer drinking game, I came 4th out of 5 people. Happy with the free mug of beer that we got to drink, we got back to our seats. As we were finishing up, we heard our names being announced a second time!Having lost the first round, this was a definite surprise. We went across another time, and this time all the contestants had to dance it out to impress a bunch of girls. Guess what? My turn came and I danced. I am not too shabby a dancer but then again I hadn't danced in a while. So, when the vedict came, I got a mere 2.5/5 from the girls(out of the 5 girls, 2 had liked me, and one was undecided :P). Once again, happy to have lost, we got back to our table and finished our food etc. Now this first guy had to catch a bus, remember? So we made to leave, paid our bill and were about to leave when there was an announcement for the next round contestants. My name wasn't in that list. Although, Partha's name was in the list, we informed the Kingfisher team and left as we were getting very late already.
Saturday- 8th May, 2009
I received a call from someone from Kingfisher who informed me that I was a finalist for 'Hunt for the King' contest. You can imagine my shock at this news, of course. I had fared badly in the two rounds that I had played and didn't even make it to the third!
Anyways, I decided to go to the finals, to be held in Bottles and Chimneys, Begumpet. I was told to be there by 7.00PM and I got there by 7.30PM due to traffic. There I was greeted by the host, Maryanne, who was quite polite and asked me a few questions about myself.
The contest started around 9PM, finally, I guess everything happens on IST(Indian Standard Time) only :P
Well, of course they didn't just keep us waiting there. Around 8.00PM, we were shown to a table and were told that we could order anything and it'd be taken care of by Kingfisher :D.
Coming back to the finals. The first round consisted of drinking beer with two straws. I am coming to think of these beer drinking contests as more of a kick off round than a round that actually reflects on the results! As usual, I was among the last few to finish. Feeling slightly down, I got off the stage along with the others. The next round involved dancing, and not just any dance, 'item' dance baby...
As I waited for my turn, I saw all the contestants before me go and perform. I was quite happy to see that they were more or less my level only, although there was a exception to this perception later on. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am not much of a dancer, and add to that the fact that I haven't shaken a leg since almost a year and a half now. Such was my situation but still I got on the stage and did my thing. I'd like to think that I pulled of a decent performance. After all the contestants had performed, we were asked to go around the club and gather beads from various people. Apparently, the kingfisher people had distributed these beads across the club to the patrons and told them to give it to the person who they think performed the best. Either ways, as soon as the time started, all the people darted off the stage and into the crowd. I noticed that all of them made a beeline for the ground floor, so, I went straight to the first floor thinking that I'd be able to get all the beads up there. I was quite right in my thinking BUT the fact was that less beads were distributed on that floor as compared to the other floor. Either ways, I managed a decent number and came back down. The next round was more to my liking, and it turns out, it was also the elimination round viz. out of the 11 contestants, only 5 would remain after this round. Basically, some girl was called out from the crowd and the contestants were to woo her with their own pick up lines.
The round started and some girl was called on to the stage and explained the rules. It later turned out that this 'some girl' was actually a telugu filmstar! At the moment, since I didn't know, it didn't really factor in. As all the contestants were saying there lines, I was forming my line in my head. It wasn't quite ready and all of a sudden it was my turn! So I took the mic with this half baked idea and spoke. I am not going to mention what I said but after I was done, I could hear some encouraging sounds from the audience(ooooooooooohs and aaaaaaahs :P). This round was finished and the cheerleaders took the stage, as the names of the finalists were sorted out. Now, I have seen a few performances in my lifetime. And what followed is also now one of the performances but I can tell you, it is wayyyyy up in the hotlist! It was, to cut a long story short, mesmerizing and mindblowing. After the performance was over, the cheerleaders took the judging seats and finally the results were announced. I made it in the top five.
The 'final' round commenced shortly and surprisingly, it turned out to be a Q&A round. With the cheerleaders in the judging seat, I was expecting some more dancing to follow, but I wasn't exactly complaining :D. Eventually, my turn came and the question I was asked was, "If you were a girl for one day, what would you give up?" Now, what the hell kinda question is that? I was quite dumbfounded in the beginning and I am also aware that I didn't exactly answer the question straight. It was more like that I beat around the bush and twisted the question and in the end came up with a feminist answer. When I had answered the question, I could hear a lot of booooos from the audience. None of the girls was booooing. I guess I had struck a chord somewhere. So, I retorted to the boooing crowd with an 'I don't give a **** what you think' line and stepped off stage.
As the round finished, the results were being decided by the judges, I went off, satisfied with myself and danced around a bit, had something to drink. Finally, it was result time. I was quite sure that I won't make it. So I stood on the stage with an open mind and waited. The first winner was announced. Vamshi(the other winner) looked quite happy and was greeted by the crowd with lots of cheers. I still stood there, NOT holding my breath but wishing that it should be over soon. My prayers were answered. The second winner was announced. It was ME! I couldn't believe it at once. I looked around and then at the audience who, until then had been rooting for another contestant who I also thought would probably win. But goddamit, I WON, not him. And someone also poured beer on my head. I was still a bit dazed when all the cheerleaders came on stage and crowned the two of us. This was followed by a victory dance. As soon as I got off the stage, I informed my friends and family, who too were happy and excited for me. I got out of the club and took a cab back home, still numb from the victory...
As I waited for my turn, I saw all the contestants before me go and perform. I was quite happy to see that they were more or less my level only, although there was a exception to this perception later on. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am not much of a dancer, and add to that the fact that I haven't shaken a leg since almost a year and a half now. Such was my situation but still I got on the stage and did my thing. I'd like to think that I pulled of a decent performance. After all the contestants had performed, we were asked to go around the club and gather beads from various people. Apparently, the kingfisher people had distributed these beads across the club to the patrons and told them to give it to the person who they think performed the best. Either ways, as soon as the time started, all the people darted off the stage and into the crowd. I noticed that all of them made a beeline for the ground floor, so, I went straight to the first floor thinking that I'd be able to get all the beads up there. I was quite right in my thinking BUT the fact was that less beads were distributed on that floor as compared to the other floor. Either ways, I managed a decent number and came back down. The next round was more to my liking, and it turns out, it was also the elimination round viz. out of the 11 contestants, only 5 would remain after this round. Basically, some girl was called out from the crowd and the contestants were to woo her with their own pick up lines.
The round started and some girl was called on to the stage and explained the rules. It later turned out that this 'some girl' was actually a telugu filmstar! At the moment, since I didn't know, it didn't really factor in. As all the contestants were saying there lines, I was forming my line in my head. It wasn't quite ready and all of a sudden it was my turn! So I took the mic with this half baked idea and spoke. I am not going to mention what I said but after I was done, I could hear some encouraging sounds from the audience(ooooooooooohs and aaaaaaahs :P). This round was finished and the cheerleaders took the stage, as the names of the finalists were sorted out. Now, I have seen a few performances in my lifetime. And what followed is also now one of the performances but I can tell you, it is wayyyyy up in the hotlist! It was, to cut a long story short, mesmerizing and mindblowing. After the performance was over, the cheerleaders took the judging seats and finally the results were announced. I made it in the top five.
The 'final' round commenced shortly and surprisingly, it turned out to be a Q&A round. With the cheerleaders in the judging seat, I was expecting some more dancing to follow, but I wasn't exactly complaining :D. Eventually, my turn came and the question I was asked was, "If you were a girl for one day, what would you give up?" Now, what the hell kinda question is that? I was quite dumbfounded in the beginning and I am also aware that I didn't exactly answer the question straight. It was more like that I beat around the bush and twisted the question and in the end came up with a feminist answer. When I had answered the question, I could hear a lot of booooos from the audience. None of the girls was booooing. I guess I had struck a chord somewhere. So, I retorted to the boooing crowd with an 'I don't give a **** what you think' line and stepped off stage.
As the round finished, the results were being decided by the judges, I went off, satisfied with myself and danced around a bit, had something to drink. Finally, it was result time. I was quite sure that I won't make it. So I stood on the stage with an open mind and waited. The first winner was announced. Vamshi(the other winner) looked quite happy and was greeted by the crowd with lots of cheers. I still stood there, NOT holding my breath but wishing that it should be over soon. My prayers were answered. The second winner was announced. It was ME! I couldn't believe it at once. I looked around and then at the audience who, until then had been rooting for another contestant who I also thought would probably win. But goddamit, I WON, not him. And someone also poured beer on my head. I was still a bit dazed when all the cheerleaders came on stage and crowned the two of us. This was followed by a victory dance. As soon as I got off the stage, I informed my friends and family, who too were happy and excited for me. I got out of the club and took a cab back home, still numb from the victory...
Monday, March 16, 2009
How to transfer your Google Maps favourites to your Nokia phone?
This tutorial/guide is meant for people using Nokia S60 phones and want to get their Google Maps placemarks on their phones to use with Nokia Maps. This could be particularly useful for people who mark all their places of interest before going on a trip and later want to get all those places on their phones!
A Little Background on Why this tutorial is here in the first place
Google Maps and Google Earth work with KML(Keyhole Markup Language) to store the locations of all user-generated(you) content. Or rather, more correct would be that they can give you the data that you've collected in this KML format, which btw, has been adopted as an open standard for storing geospatial information by Open Geospatial Consortium in 2007.
Now, Nokia comes along and launches a slew of powerful phones which are capable of tonnes of features and one of them happens to be that of GPS . The newly released higher end phones come bundled with a GPS receiver which can tell you your location and combined with applications like Nokia Maps and Google Maps(for mobile), the location of things around you. In view of this generosity showered upon us, people (read geeks) start exploring the possibilities that this newfound power promises.
One of the possiblilities could be to just save all your favourite(interesting) places around you while you are surfing the net on the desktop.This can be achieved through Google Maps and while you're on the move you can probably just look them up on your phone and truly exploit(or at least feel that way) the power of GPS on your phone.
The thought is good but Nokia is a BITCH! They don't use KML (like the rest of the world does) to store geospatial information(your placemarks on Google Maps). Instead, they use .LMX format which is just XML spelled backwards and is also an XML structure like KML but slightly different. So, in order to get all your placemarks on Google onto your phone, you need to find a way to get your KML converted to LMX format which is Nokia readable.
Here's how you go about it.
The Tutorial
Chances are that your google map would have a lot of crap placemarks that you'd have saved without giving a proper name and description. If this is the case, there would definitely be unwanted HTML elements in these placemarks which would be a problem. The best thing to do in this scenario is to simply delete the whole "" node to get rid of that placemark.
Hope it helps! Please share your experiences with this tutorial and if you find any other workarounds.
A Little Background on Why this tutorial is here in the first place
Google Maps and Google Earth work with KML(Keyhole Markup Language) to store the locations of all user-generated(you) content. Or rather, more correct would be that they can give you the data that you've collected in this KML format, which btw, has been adopted as an open standard for storing geospatial information by Open Geospatial Consortium in 2007.
Now, Nokia comes along and launches a slew of powerful phones which are capable of tonnes of features and one of them happens to be that of GPS . The newly released higher end phones come bundled with a GPS receiver which can tell you your location and combined with applications like Nokia Maps and Google Maps(for mobile), the location of things around you. In view of this generosity showered upon us, people (read geeks) start exploring the possibilities that this newfound power promises.
One of the possiblilities could be to just save all your favourite(interesting) places around you while you are surfing the net on the desktop.This can be achieved through Google Maps and while you're on the move you can probably just look them up on your phone and truly exploit(or at least feel that way) the power of GPS on your phone.
The thought is good but Nokia is a BITCH! They don't use KML (like the rest of the world does) to store geospatial information(your placemarks on Google Maps). Instead, they use .LMX format which is just XML spelled backwards and is also an XML structure like KML but slightly different. So, in order to get all your placemarks on Google onto your phone, you need to find a way to get your KML converted to LMX format which is Nokia readable.
Here's how you go about it.
The Tutorial
- Go to google maps, you might have made 'maps' of your favourite places?E.g. I have a map of all the places around my house. Select the Map which contains your favourite places. Alternatively, you'd have to create a map of all the placemarks that you want on your phone.
- After you have the maps in place, open one of the maps and copy the link location of the rss feed link .
- Paste the link into a new tab and append "&output=kml" to the link. Hit enter. You should see a download notification for yourMapName.kml. Download and save this .kml file.
- Go to this site and browse for the saved .kml file. Then, click 'Convert to LMX'. This time you'd get a download notification for a .lmx file. Download and save this file.
- It would seem that all is done now and we just need to transfer this file to our phone and things would all work out, right? Sorry buddy, there's a little bit more effort that you'd have to put in. The amount of effort would also be based on how well you've maintained the description and all other metadata of your placemarks in the map.
- Open the file in any text editor( I use Notepad++)In line#3 there's a missing tag so paste "
- If there's an error on the phone, chances are that some html tags have creeped into your .lmx file. You'd need to manually remove these html elements then transfer the file to your phone again. The file should work perfectly in the phone now.
Chances are that your google map would have a lot of crap placemarks that you'd have saved without giving a proper name and description. If this is the case, there would definitely be unwanted HTML elements in these placemarks which would be a problem. The best thing to do in this scenario is to simply delete the whole "" node to get rid of that placemark.
Hope it helps! Please share your experiences with this tutorial and if you find any other workarounds.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Thought(s) for the day
- Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
- Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.
- Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it. (Exactly my point :D)
My thoughts on the 'Thoughts for the day'
I have decided to force myself into blogging, since I have clearly shown no signs of signing on otherwise. Therefore, I would, from now on, put in at least something down before I go to bed. So, here are some quotes, not mine, yet, at any rate ;) But rest assured, I wouldn't put down any sloppy stuff here, everything that comes into the blog undergoes stringent QC. That would be my expert/amateur/naive (your pick) opinions about verse that is stimulating, clever and witty. So, here goes.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Back to blogging...
Back to blogging? Or should I say starting afresh with blogging? I'd leave that for you to decide. Anyways, it's been a while since I got down and wrote something here. I always used to find sorry ass excuses for not writing, being busy et al.
Times have changed, and I find myself facing a draught of things to do. Currently I am sitting on my console at home besides a window looking out to the labyrinth of flats of the 'township' that I am presently living in. The weather couldn't be better. Cool breeze blowing, black clouds just itching to rain down upon the city of Hyderabad. ***IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: It just started drizzling***I'd say that the sweet weather is begging me to be somewhere else, perhaps walking hand in hand down a beautiful park with the girl of my dreams having a lively conversation about 'us'.***IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The drizzling stopped*** But as fate would have it, I am stuck at home tending to my writing skills.***IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: The sun has shown up now! What the hell is wrong with this weather?!!!***
I fathom that you've had enough of those important announcements now! But you know what, I'll bombard you with them just to bug you if I have to, or it could also end up making your reading of this blog a little better considering that you know what kind of breeze was blowing when I was typing away here sitting next to the window.
As you might have guessed, this blog doesn't really have an agenda, or a common thread binding my distracted musings. Welcome to my world, dear reader, where the attention span can be infinitesimally small as well as go on to become a ubiquitous phenomenon while I obsess about one thing or another.
What I'll do now is that I'll let you know about what's going on in my mind right now. I am wondering whether I should watch a movie to while away my afternoon or get down to serious reading, ET editorials etc., or what? Got any suggestions?
The most pressing thing that I am having difficulty coping with right now is my mother, hollering me to go take a bath. And it is slowly dawning upon me that there really is no way around this problem. I am sure there are infinite beleaguered souls out there who couldn't agree more with me. So, I am gonna take your leave for now and sort out this getting-clean-once again-mess and be back with something more definite and focussed next time, if there is a next time, that is.
Peace.
Aditya
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