Live Free. Live Happy.

I along with few of my IIIT classmates had planned a get together yesterday. Not wanting to go to one of the regular places, we decided to pay a visit to Anantigiri Hills (75 kms from Hyderabad). Not a bad choice but at a completely wrong time. We've heard this place is really good but that is only in the rainy and winter season. Only too bad, we went in summer :). All the trees had shed their leaves. Some of us tried trekking for a while after which we got so exhausted that we just lazed about for a couple of hours in the shade and then started back.

To begin with, I've spent some time last week with my cousin Appu. Well, only a couple of days actually. One was all day out and the other day was at our aunt's place. We went to the movie 300 in PVR, did go-karting and played a few games like FooseBall, Air Hockey at Runaway 9 and to end it went for a boat ride and had dinner at Eat Street. The first time I am taking someone out for an entire day driving all by myself. So this makes it quite a special event for me :). She left to U.S. yesterday night.

Online, I've made quite a number of posts last weekend. I've also updated the About Me page which I must have probably edited last in 500 B.C. :). As the number of posts are increasing, I am realizing that my blogging is mainly oriented towards informative (especially technical) articles rather than personal views and updates. So I guess this is where my writing interest lies in :).

A new year ... a new look. My site has gone a complete redesign to make it more aesthetic, more feature rich and make maintainence for me easier. And the entire credit goes to Drupal (http://www.drupal.org) for building such a wonderful CMS.

Howdy! Happy Chirstmas and a Merry New Year!!! I hope everyone has a fun filled year and also hope I contribute more time to my website :D. In case you have not noticed (which I am sure you didn't :)), I have spent quite some time in converting the urls to SEF (Search Engine Friendly). Apart from that I am planning to implement the following in my website:

• Captcha (for avoiding spamming)
• Comments for user feedback
• RSS for delivering content directly to feed readers

It is my mom's bday and I am celebrating this by adding two great features to my site today :D - "Recents Posts" and "Google Search". I initially thought of writing my own search engine but due to lack of time, I have for the time being settled for Google Search. Very soon the comments section is also going to be added. Once that is done, I am planning to take up blogging more seriously.

After a looooooooooooooong time, I am back :D. As I had already mentioned, I plan to add some great features to my website to make it more convenient for visitors like you. But not being as free as I was earlier ;-), it will take time to implement these changes. To start with, the first major change was to make the site compatible with XHtml Strict 1.0 and make it dispaly uniformaly across all major browsers. This also involved writing the code for the above menu bar by myself :).

Had a gr888 24 bday. Snaps can be accessed at 24 bday snaps :).

Added two new monitoring services for my website so that I can get immediate alerts when my site goes down. Apart from this I also get a weekly and monthly report showing me the site uptime stats. Some things you have to look out for while subscribing to these services are:

• Monitoring interval - most free services offer 1 hour monitoring interval but you can also get a monitoring interval of 15 mins
• False Alarm protection - this means that the site would be tested from various locations to be doubly sure that the website is really down

Have just come back from a trip to Ooty-Kodaikanal-Madurai-Palani. The photos can be accessed at Kodai Trip Photos. Kindly note that the last three slides (151, 152 and 153) are actually 30 seconds videos of size 15-20 MB. Unless, you are very enthusiastic about viewing them, I suggest you do not visit these last three slides :).