Stories from a three days Goan

Atlast found some time to chip in something for the blog. Last weekend i was at Goa, a welcoming break from the boring job. Started to Goa on April 4 Friday night by train, setting aside two escalations that were pestering me for sometime. Once the trip was on it was only fun. You could see signs of Goa in the train itself. Most of them were tourists going to train and most of them were already in excited state with the help of drinks. The train was travelling through the western ghats giving some opportunity to explore the scenic beauty of the mountains.

Reached Goa by 1.30 on Saturday. From the journey to the hotel we could confirm what we have heard about Goa. Yeah Goa is famous for drinks  because of low tax, and is visible from the numerous wine shops in the  roads. Most of shop that serve soft drinks also contained atleast some  cans of beer. But one thing that is not known about Goa is that, it is  difficult to move around in Goa, unless you have a lot of cash to burn.  We had booked room near Colva beach and were soon at colva beach having  a really good time in the beach. Though the sun was scorching the skins, the sea water helped in with standing the heat. Evening we were at
Majorda beach, playing football after around 4 years.

On sunday we hired five vehicles, and started the trip to the northern beaches. We started the expedition with a visit to Dona Paula. Then  we were at Coco beach for a boat ride to see the dolphins. We were  lucky the back of few dolphins. Be careful about the rates for the  boat ride, it ranges from 100 to 400 depending on persons. While we  went for 100 per person, we had two people in the same boat paying  Rs.400. Then we visited the Aguada fort and few other beaches like calangute, Bagga. But did not spend much time there.

On monday morning the plan was to visit paulolem. But since time was running out, visited cavelossim and Benaulim beaches near Colva. After that we were off to Panaji or Panjim to catch the evening bus. While on the way stopped at the Basillica of BOM jesus church, a 400 year old chuch that still contains the body of St.Francis Xavier who died  few hundred years ago. After some shopping in Panaji market for a while  we boarded Sharma travels for a 20 hour trip back to work. Heard that KSRTC is better when compared to private transports.

One last point about Goa, Goa does not follow the Indian rules and the policemen there have their own rule and gazette. If the fine for driving without "Pollution check" is 100 in other cities, in goa it is 500. Before you  rent a vehicle make sure you check for all the docs and make sure you have the DL.

What to do during free time

Most of us have our own idea of spending free time, anyway this is just a hint of what i do during free time. If you are against generalisation read the title as "What sen does during free time". By free time i mean the time you are trying to kill, when you are deprived of electronic gadgets and if you do not want to do any
useful work.

Newspaper is the best friend

Newspapers are mighty tools that help in killing time. Anyway it depends on the choice of the newspapers. There are few newspapers here in bangalore which contain nothing but gossips. Starting from hollywood, bollywood the gossips boils downs to that of individual personal life. If a techie eats it becomes a news, if he  breaks his  relationship with his girlfriend it becomes the headlines. Sudokus in  newspapers also help a lot.

Phone a Friend

Sounds like a Kaun Bangega Crorepati option, is it ? This is one of the best options that i use almost every  night. If there is a friend who is in the same state like you, without work, with no option left to kill time,  then he is the right choice. Pickup the phone call him and talk rubbish for hours until you feel sleepy. Since   i have good amount of free talktime for local calls, talking for hours has not troubled me.

Sit and Stare

The most effortless option, lie down on your bed or if possible on the terrace, stare at the sky or ceiling and  let your imagination run wild. Think about what will happen tomorrow, what will happen if you meet a  beautiful girl tomorrow or what will happen if you get a chance to thrash your manager... If you want to  test your memory, think about what happened this day, last year. Rummaging through the past will always be interesting, as long as the present is pleasant.

Specifying categories for posts from weblogger

After all it is possible to specify categories for the blogs posted
from the weblogger mode in emacs. All you have to add is to add the
"Keywords" section to the header and specify the categories as comma
separated values. The only limitation is that, you cannot add any
new categories using weblogger.

If the header that you get is something like this,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
--text follows this line--

Add the "Keywords:" header and specify the existing categories,
something like,

Subject:
Newsgroup:
Keywords:
--text follows this line--

Now the only feature that is needed to make the configuration complete
is adding tags. Searching for ways to add that.

Using Weblogger mode in Emacs

Wow finally i was able to blog from emacs. First had thoughts ofwriting a python client using xmlrpc for posting in wordpress but thatwas all before i came to know about the weblogger mode. What has to be done to enable the weblogger mode in Emacs ? All you have to do is to download the weblogger.el and the xml-rpc.el to a directory of your choice and enable them. Once you downloadthe el files add the following lines to your .emacs file

(add-to-list 'load-path "")
(require 'weblogger)

Now reload the configuration or restart emacs. Weblogger need xml-rpc and URL. If you have them  installed, Emacs would startup without any problems. Setup weblogger using the command, M-x weblogger-setup-weblog and enter the weburl, username and password. For wordpress the URL is http://yourblogaddress/xmlrpc.php

Now you are done, start blogging using M-x weblogger-start-entry.

There are still few loose ends to be tied up to make the webloggercomplete for my account. Still i am not able to specify the title and the category for the post. Hope to do that soon....

Test - Trying to post from emacs

Testing to blog from emacs. No idea about whether this will go
through fine. If you are reading this post, there will be a post
above this explaining the same.

Few funny phobias

Was reading through the list of phobias, and these are some which i thought to be funny or weird.

ablutophobia - fear of bathing
callophobia - fear of beauty
neophobia - fear of change
pantiphobia - fear of everything
xenophobia - fear of foreigners
polyphobia - fear of many things
musophobia - fear of mice
demophobia - fear of people
acoustophobia - fear of sound
lalophobia - fear of speaking
logophobia - fear of study
phronemophobia - fear of thinking
basophobia - fear of walking
plutophobia - fear of wealth
ergophobia - fear of work
cibophobia - fear of food
geliophobia - fear of laughter
venustrophobia - fear of beautiful women
Eisoptrophobia - fear of seeing oneself in mirror :D
Somniphobia - fear of sleep

Last but not the least, the phobia of many bachelors

Phalacrophobia - fear of becoming bald

The 100th post

This post happens to be the 100th post in wordpress, considering the posts in blogger this is the 151st. Started blogging before three years on seeing my seniors who themselves were active blogger when they were in college. Soon a there was a small congregation of bloggers who still hold on to the habit. If you are curious to know who they are, peep into the links at the side of this blog. Soon blogging became a habit, and if the blog remained without any updates for a long time, it certainly looked like a pending job. The most encouraging thing is whatever junk is posted there is atleast someone to read the junk you have posted. Example could be the Kanaa Kaanum Kaalangal post, it was overwhelming to see the replies for the post though the reason is the fame of the serial. After coming to office the rate of  blogging has decreased greatly. As bugs continue to bug the life, most of the time is spent in office and spending time on blogging has become difficult. Lot of things flash at times but posting in blog has become
difficult. But blogging has turned into a inveterate and think will not die just like that.

Posting from ScribeFire

Came across this plugin for firefox called scribefire. Scribefire is a blog editor that integrates  with the browser and lets you to easily post to your blog. So thought of giving it  a try. If this post gets updated in my blogsite, then i would say "Scribefire is cool". One more information that i found while configuring scribefire is, Scribefire seems to be using xmlrpc for communication with the  blog site, though i am not sure.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Guifications in Pidgin.

Had been using Pidgin very long time for both my office and personal IM accounts. One missing feature that i never noticed was missing notifications when a buddy comes online or goes  offline. Started searching  and came across Guifications, a plugin for pidgin that will show a popup for a number of  configurable events. Guifications can be downloaded and installed  from the following location.

http://downloads.guifications.org/plugins/Guifications2/

It notifies you for a lot of events but what i wanted was when my friends login and logout of their IMs. I default popup that notifies failed to impress me, so started searching some themes for Guifications and found a lot of cool and colourful themes in the  following link.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=676821&group_id=92888&func=browse

Installation of theme is easy, all you have to do is to unzip and  place the folders at the correct location. In windows it is the  following directory

<PIDGIN INSTALLATION DIR>\pixmaps\pidgin\guifications\themes

If you have the habit of displaying the song you hear as the status, musictracker plugin will help you in doing so in Pidgin. Check out  http://code.google.com/p/musictracker/ for information about the  same.

Kollimalai - Serene and Splendid

Visited kollimalai last week along with seniors, and it turned out to be a great one. Kollimalai was not a well known hill station in Tamilnadu. Not much visited by tourists i guess. Located at around two hours from salem, kollimalai remains undisturbed from tourists harassment . Serenity lends beauty to the place. No traffic, not many people around to disturb you. You are alone with your friends to enjoy the beauty of the hill station. You also have an opportunity to capture the untouched nature in your digicam. The most interesting spot in there is the "Athisaya Aruvi", the waterfalls. To enjoy the the waterfalls you have to climb down around 500 steep steps. The cool water drops falling from the steep rocks looks marvellous and so is the feeling when it falls down and splashes on your body. Few other places include

Arapalliswarar temple
vasalurpatti which has a small lake with boats
Semmedu where there is a small statue of Valvil Ori statue.
A small lake, i forgot the name.

There were few more temples and spots. The most interesting part of the stay in kollimalai is the early morning trekking which we had. Roamed around the gardens and hills there in kollimalai enjoying the early morning chillness. On the return trip went to Hoganekkal, the ride in the calm waters of the cauvery water was great. This happened to be the first trip with super super super seniors. The showed a lot of maturity in organizing the trip, and the trip ended with out any problems.

Snaps at http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/sens2003/KollimalaiTrip