During the Valparai trip, if someone really enjoyed the trip to the core, it would be my daughter. Let the pictures speak:
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The entire set is here and direct link for slideshow.
At Fiorano, with 10 hrs/day of official work timings and 6 days per week schedule, its easy to get addicted to work. For a break, guys planned for a 5 day trip to Goa last weekend, but then that got shortened to 3 days. I would have joined them, if not for the trip that I’ve planned with my family. I haven’t gone for any trips in the past few months, so I really needed an outing.
I decided it will not be a sight-seeing trip and its only meant for lazing around. Valparai sounded like a perfect place. There are lot of tea estates and many bungalows owned by them for their owners/managers guest house. It will be occupied only for few weeks in an year, so the rest of the time it will be rented out. I’ve booked a room in the Indraprastha Bungalow, a property of Waterfalls Estate.
Its around 100 kms from my house and once I go above the Aliyar Dam, the road becomes so scenic. Its been raining & drizzling. With greenish everywhere and with the mist, the travel was so good.
We couldn’t enjoy all the way till Valparai, as the Bungalow is actually 10kms before the town. The bungalow is built by the English when the ruled. There is a 100 year old pine tree which spells the age of the place.
But don’t underestimate the luxuries of the place. Its posh and well maintained. A small garden with a big lawn is the one my daughter loved the most.
Whenever it didn’t rain/drizzle, we went out for a walk inside the Tea Gardens. We even visited the Tea Factory in the evening and saw how tea is made from those leaves.
It doesn’t come cheap compared to hotels, but not as costly as a resort as well. The owners of this place are very clear that hospitality is not their business. Its both their strength and their weakness. If you want a menu card with variety of dishes or a swimming pool, perhaps its not a place for you. But for a person like me, good food (the care taker Mr Perumal is an excellent cook), nice ambiance, add with the fact that no cellphone network could reach you there, its a perfect weekend getaway to laze around.
If you want to see the entire set of pictures, its here.
Found a good video thru a forward:
Loved this quote: “An India that no longer boycotts foreign made goods. But buys out the companies that makes them instead”. 
… again.
Thanks everyone for your wishes.
PS: I almost forgot that a website in the name of Orkut exists. Looks like it reminds me and tells the world about this fateful day
Today I was booking my tickets to Chennai in the IRCTC website. When I was about to click the “Pay Now” button there was small link saying “Click here to see the performance of the Payment Gateways”. I was puzzled what the heck is that. I clicked and an XL file got dowloaded. It said how much money has been transacted thru each payment gateway last month. The total amount that IRCTC has received was 2491585261. Yes that little less than 250 crores!!! Infact the banks also benefit hugely by this. The charges for each payment gateway is a minimum of Rs 10 (for a debit card) or 1.85% (credit card). Here is the comparision chart. Calculate how much money they make!
The yearly total would be around 3,000 crores and they don’t even care to give a nice looking feature rich website. Someone got to tell Lalooji that if they have a proper functioning website, they can even make more money and less crowd in the reservation counters.
Happened to Gimp a Wall-E poster for Ganymede poster contest. Its been voted for the fourth position. Happy
http://www.eclipse.org/ganymede/postercontest.php
You can find the original poster here.
FireFox 3 is released and it will create the most downloaded software in 24 hours time. The original estimate was around 5 million copies. But the actual downloads exceeded the expectation and crossed that level well before 24 hours. Due to heavy download, Mozilla servers were down intially. I checked the counter now and its already crossed 7 million and the downloads were clocking at more than 7k per minute. Hope the total download in 24 hours will be around 10 millions.
Congrats Firefox team.
I’ve got few TinEye invites available. In case you are interested in trying out this Image Search Engine, let me know, I’ll send you an invitation.
Yup, it doesn’t cost you anything. Its absolutely free
I often use the Albert Einstein’s quote, “Simple, but not simpler”. I think I should rethink that.
Today there was some crap movie in some channel. The hero will be flying a B2 bomber and there will be few F-14s behind his tail. He will switch to stealth mode and fly away. My daughter came from outside running towards me. I thought I’ll make the scene simple for her. I said, “See that biiiiiiig aeroplane? That is going so fast and the small ones can’t even see”. She turned to the screen, saw the bomber flying for few seconds and exclaimed “kaka!” (crow)
Hmmm, I should think simpler
I always love Pixar movies - not for Steve, but for the amount of detailed attention they pour into every little stuff. Now the upcoming Wall E is something special for the following reasons:
Pixar took too much efforts to make us visualize a fish as a character in the Finding Nemo (I’m not going into details here, in short - we can’t easily visualize something as a character unless it resembles humans in most of ways. Think of the characters of Shark Tale, they are more of humans than of fishes) I bet they have gone even beyond that to create a movie without dialogs. Waiting for the release …
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