Vacation Time

So, the festival season is just around the corner and with Dussehra falling on October 2nd (Damn! Why do two holidays have to fall on the same day??) It’ll be a four-day-week for us. So thatz the perfect time to take a vacation

I’ll be off to my hometown on friday and shall return the next Sunday i.e. a nice and long 9-day vacation. My own li’l navaratri Spending time at home during the festive season is something that I’ve missed since my schooldays and now maybe the last time I may get to do it. What with life zooming ahead at a fast pace and challenges awaiting at all bends. The coming 2-3 years will play a big role in defining my future…and hopefully it’ll be as bright as ever.

Happy Dusshera and a Jolly good Vacations to me

Weekend Movie Watching V

I don’t exactly remember the number of the last ‘Weekend Movie Watching’ post and am just assuming that it is IV and hence the V in this post! So the weekend of 23rd and 24th of September was quite a wet one as well as a frustrating one. Wet, because it rained in the evenings, thus making it difficult to venture out and roam around. Frustrating, because for almost the entire saturday we had a powercut !

Anyways, the movie marathon started on friday night with the Snake flick – Anacondas : Hunt for the blood orchid! which was totally tepid and uninviting. Contrary to my expectation of there being onlyw 2 or 3 snakes, this movie had a whole bunch of them…almost more than a dozen! Next in line was the telegu movie Super which ‘tried’ to be a ‘Dhoom’ in the making with all snazzy bike stunts and robberies et al but which turns out to be a damp squib instead. The saving grace was Sandeep Chowta’s music and for my roomie, Ayesha Takia’s (often garish!) appearance. 

Owing to the saturday powercut, we could resume our movie-watching in the late afternoon with The Ring Two, the second part of the horror flick wherein samara returns to haunt Naomi Watts and her son. A watchable movie, this one though not as spooky as the first was OK. Somehow I felt that the rationale behind making this one was the first one’s success!!! We also could barely manage to sit through Air Force One – in Telugu! before latching onto a really heart-touching flick called Anandam. The other telugu flick that we managed to see off safely was the gory-and-bory Arjun starring Mahesh Babu. Saturday evening was rounded off with the awesome comedy movie – Garam Masala, starring Akshay Kumar and John Abraham. A remake of a Malayalam hit, this movie is a complete laugh riot. ’twas time for hindi flicks again and Salaam Namaste, a teenybopper love story having an aged-looking Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta in it. Itz actually a remake of the hollywood flick Nine Months and was slightly over-the-top, esp. the climax. The last movie for the weekend was Sanjay Dutt and Arshad Warsi’s Anthony Kaun Hai? which attempted to be a comedy but succeeded only in parts. Thus endedtwo-and-a-half days of watching the television and spending a lazy weekend.

P.S: I had made this post on Monday itself, but I wonder how it didn’t get posted  

Big FM 92.7 Launches in Hyderabad

According to CtrlAltDel, a member of FreeHyderabad dicussion forums, Hyderabad has a new FM station since today morning :

A new FM channel 92.7 – no announcements/messages, just songs; yesterday morning Premadesam songs in a non-stop loop

A little bit of reseaarch and lo! I had the dope . FM 92.7 or Big FM as it is proposed to be called is the flagship FM channel of Reliance-Adlabs, the JV of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Communications and Manmohan Shetty’s AdLabs.

Anil Ambani chose to go on air from Hyderabad with his FM station Big 92.7 FM.

Just like the name conveys, Ambani Junior is aiming big and wants to be heard by 20 crore listeners, which means every fifth Indian across the country.

“A city of the size of Hyderabad compared to similar cities in America or Europe tends to have thirty radio stations in one city. Actually New York or LA has about a hundred stations and it is quite amazing that we live in the realm of about two or three stations,” said Tarun Katial, COO, Big 92.7 FM.

An interesting first for the FM station is television-like outdoor broadcast vans. Also 100 traffic wardens in Delhi, Hyderabad and Chennai will report on traffic snarls. South Indian actress Asin is the brand ambassador of Big 92.7 FM.

“Let me just tell you one thing. Big 92.7 FM is big and it is going to rock,” said Asin.

The oxygen for any FM station are film songs and Big claims that it will play 40 per cent unduplicated music, which means no one else will play those songs.

Source

That is definitely good news for Hyderabadis who already have four FM stations to listen to – RadioCity, RadioMirchi, Vividh Bharati and FM Rainbow. And now with the launch of Big FM, Hyderabad joins the league of cities having multiple FM channels. The listener has never had it so good . What remains to be seen is the kind of music that Big FM plays. If its claims of playing unduplicated music is indeed true, then it could get a lot of listenership in pretty quick time. But, only time will tell……

New Theme

So then Matt posted about this New Theme: Rounded and I, like a true blue nincompoop, commented about how WP themes are always narrow and leave too much whitespace at the sides! That too, without applying/using the theme! And when Matt did say that it was a wide-page theme, I used it here and had a sheepish li’l grin

But I kinda dislike the brown hues…black would’ave been better! And I noticed laters that the ‘baloon’ over the comments window which says “leave a reply” and the designer arrow that emanates from the main rounded post window are too garish for comfort! So me gonna stick to this theme for a very leetull time.

P.S: Part 2 of moi travelogue will be appearing soon.

P.P.S: I noticed that the Smileys in the post are aligning towards the left…irrespective of where they are entered in the text

My Excursion – Day 1

Ah! At last I got the time to pen my Travelogue about the trip that I had undertaken with my colleagues over the last weekend. The places we visted were Srisailam, Mallelateertham and Kurnool. Amongst the attractions on the tour were the Thermal power station and Dam at Srisailam, a small waterfall a Mallelateertham and a vast expanse of underground caves – called the Belum Caves – at Kurnool.

Our Expedition started off from our office premises at 7 AM on the 16th. We had hired a swanky n plush coach from APTDC and would be completing the entire journey in it. Our journey meandered through the early-morning city traffic wherein we picked up our brekfast at hotel Dwaraka in Lakdi-ka-pul, made its way past the historic Charminar and before we knew, we were zooming along the highway! We stopped for a brief while to devour the steaming hot Idlis and Upma and resumed our journey. Our journey was made seemingly shorter by the various games that we had brought along which included Cards and Tambola. And ahemm…I won quite a handsome amount We reached Mallelateertham at around 11 AM and from thereon it was all by foot! The way to the waterfalls was a steep descent across some jagged rocks and man-made steps and after a tedious walk, we were there in front of the falls which were cascading in all ther splendor! Few brave folks managed to get very very close to the falls whereas the others were content with our photo sessions! After some 30 minutes at the falls, it was time for us to leave and the climb back to the top was far more excruciating than the descent! We drove on towards our next destination – Srisailam – with a brief stop for lunch at about 2 PM where we devoured with gusto some spicy pulihora and bobbatlu!

I am Back!

After a brief hiatus during which I was part of an Excursion trip with my colleagues, I am back in business

We had a rocking time over the past three days and all of us enjoyed to the hilt! The journey as well as the places covered gave us pure exhiliration which was unparalelled in recent times. I shall be giving a brief description of our trip soon….

Picnic Time!

Late September and early October is a nice time for picnics and excursions and thus a bunch of us colleagues are setting out for a nice three-day outing into the hinterlands of AP. We’ll be visiting the temple-town of Srisailam which also has a nifty little dam which generates lotsa hydel power for the state. I had visited Hirakud some years ago and was quite thrilled by that experience as one walsk over the dam as thousands of gallons of water is gushing beneath! I hope Srisailam too will be a good (if not better experience)

Next stop on our itinerary is the nearly-unheard of waterfall place called Malayateertham. Nestled among the little hills of the deccan plateau, this place has been relatively untouched by mankind and I hear that its quite serene! We’ll also be visiting the Seema town of Kurnool and visit the enchanting Belum Caves. It is said to be the longest underground cave system in South India and would be a helluva experience, I hope! So the next three days will be hectic and fun-filled….shall be back again on Tuesday. Ciao.

View Skewed in IE7

Err…the title maybe confusing here but what I want to mean is that the view of my Blog’s Admin Panel (The blue bar up above!) is pretty much skewed when viewed through IE7! The screenshot below shows how it is rendered in IE7:

I’ve contacted WP Support and have passed on the info to them though I presume that I’ve been pretty late in doing so! Many others might have already reported it I suppose.