My Company had this last min decision to participate in Bits pilani Campus event called Quark 2010. We were promoting Eset Nod32 and products. These are first few pictures …

One of the offerings we had over there was a free virus scan for USB drives and Laptops.. the amount of Computer viruses cleared from the public, students , etc were approx 500 viruses !!!!!.

More Details to follow..

” I’ll spread my wings and I’ll learn how to fly
I’ll do what it takes ?til I touch the sky
And I’ll make a wish, take a chance, make a change
And breakaway…………

Out of the darkness and into the sun
But I won’t forget all the ones that I loved
I’ll take a risk, take a chance, make a change
And breakaway !!!!!! “

With a crazy & Hectic  last week. i look for new hope this week! .. lets breakaway !!!!

So there I was, very sweetly going below the speed limit along highway 30 when I saw this cloud of smoke. Now normally these clouds of smoke are more common in summer when something gets too parched in this desert heat. So I whipped out my phone and conveniently forgot to switch it on video mode and tried taking pictures of it while trying not to bump into anyone else.

Nearing it, I realized it did indeed come from a car; a van in fact near the British School of Kuwait. It didnt seem like it had met with an accident, as it was on the emergency lane, quietly blazing away with 3 people scattered around it. I assumed they were in it and managed to get out… Only when I reached to my 6th ring exit did I see an ambulance taking that U turn behind me to get to their side. Hope everyone managed to get out okay….. Wonder what caused it….

When you end up watching too many TV series over the span of 1 year… it kind of gets to you…. it makes you feel that you are born with super powers etc!… So any way

I want to be Dr. Gregory House.. Crude, Abusive and intelligent…
I want to be Chuck.. having all the secrets of the US government
I want to be Nathan Stark living in Eureka Surrounded by Scientists of the world..
I want to be the mad scientist in Fringe, to invent crazy stuff..
I want to be Sylar, steal and takeover everyone’s powers in Heroes…
I want to be Ramsy Gordon .. to cook and invent great dishes… in Hell’s kitchen
I want to be …. Sigh!

For those who didnt understand, you need to watch the following series , Heroes,Chuck,Eureka,Hell’s Kitchen, House M.D., and Fringe!

Continuing my  webreviews, i decided to choose Axisbank, after a recent review of GulfBank from kuwait, so i can compare apple to apple.  Axis bank has been my bank in india for quite some time now, but unlike kuwait banks, they have had major flaws, when it comes to international standards… but end of the day we are supposed to choose the “least worst” service from the allocated lot.

Now comparatively like GulfBank, they have similar menu layouts like breaking business from consumer, they too have loads of content and information.  we use the online banking quite abit , but its got its flaws as well.

The Good

1. They have a lot of content, and quite simplified… but in India, content is never enough, as Indians we need to know details of where our money is, how much interest?, why this? why that.  I like the way how content is broken into Summary, Eligibility, Documentation, Terms & Conditions , etc. this is a great thing.
2. The Color scheme is “ok” .. not exciting .. but quite readable.
3. Loading time is quite decent
4. Response to Online forms, is good. I have always got responses from online forms. they are delayed but atleast we get them.

The Bad

1. Well due to the amount of content, they haven’t put in time to organize it. it is so scattered, mixed up. just thrown everywhere. But once you find it, then its really good. but otherwise this is bad. i felt the designers , wanted to fill up every gap on the site and put a link there.
   • As a Suggestion, break your topics into categories and sub categories.
   • Don’t fill up every gap on the site.
   • Sitemap ?
2. Their Copyrights have expired in 2007.. thus this mean we can steal their content? you need to renew your copyrights, its really important.
3. No Layout consistency , some pages is 800 Pixels width.. some stretch as per window. the home page of the site looks really tiny on my 1440 Pixels wide .
   • Today’s standards are in 1000 Pixels, thus giving you more place for your layout(but don’t fill it up)
4. Design looks more like a newspaper site, you need to bring in some touch of a bank and corporate feel.
5. More Photos of people are needed. Unlike Gulfbank,  you’ll have few people images, which adds some life.. but i feel more people are needed. A Bank is about people, so dont miss them out.
6. The Net Banking doesnt work, i should say 25% times in 365 days in a year.. this is not good as everyone needs online banking. the amount of emails from me  requesting for “pls fix the online services” is enough to print a 100 pages book.
7. the top menus have too many clicks to reach a particular point… so to reach “Cash Management Services”  from the home page. i have to click 2-3 times on the top menu to get there. Usage of mouseover menus minimize this tasks. Consider Customer Usability studies for this.
8. Finally the design breaks in many pages. Care must be taken for this. Someone must go through each and every page on your site to ensure functionality.

Technology Used

1. It seems to be developed in ASP ( im not sure windows or chillisoft) im banking on ASP for Windows as their hosted platform is windows 2003 server.. but i feel the whole site is mostly built on includes to repeat context menus.
2. Nameservers are from Worldnic.com
3. It concerns me that the SQL usage on this site is minimal as i study the page directory patterns. but i could be wrong. But if  i’m right that sql is not much used, then maintaining this site must be HELL.

Conclusion

Well dont know what to say here.. but i have seen them improve over the last 6 years, their progress is really slow, but happening. you can visit them here : www.axisbank.com

Well its 26th Jan 2010.. and google decides to wish everyone a “Happy National Day” . Clicking on it.. takes you to search listings of  25th Feb and the importance of it. Now this is either too early and someone doesnt know their dates  or they have a glitch in their system.

This is only for the localised version of google. i.e. www.google.com.kw.

Update : Google just fixed their error and has put their normal logo back … so now we know how the doodle looks for the upcoming event .. lol.

One of the top banks in Kuwait. Gulf bank stands out for its services rendered to both the Residential and Corporate Markets. After its major financial issue where it had investors deal in derivaties, which coz’d its Stocks to fall. It had a super comeback and get its ratings back again worldwide.

I have been personally using the online website basically everyday to check on my bank ac, credit card etc and i should say, that their online banking  is amazingly user friendly and straight to the point. However for the website, its got its plus points as well as its flaws.

The Plus points :

1. What i like about gulfbank website is the amount of reading content. They try to clear maximum doubts by the amount of information on their services. Their copywriting is clear,  to the point and very self explanatory.
2. Their color scheme is pleasant, works exactly as per their brand image. but i have seen companies who have abused their color schemes to serve their own branding and left the consumer with an eye sore. The minimum usage of Red and more stress on white background with clear text, ensure readability.
3. They got great Loading time, objects like flash are kept to the minimum, pages which have flash are low weight.
4. its rare that i found their site having a downtime, which is a very good thing!

The bad :

1. In Contradiction to my first point. too much content means loads of responsibility to organise it. there are times, we need information like “ATM points” , “Opening hours of a branch” etc.. it used to be difficult to pin point. but the moment we get it, its a breeze.
   • A suggestion for this is to keep commonly viewed queries easily available.
   • A Sitemap for the website would be amazing.
2. No Printer friendly page. Sometimes we try to print some documents and the print view ends up including all the side navigations etc. Sometimes we need these documents as references. but its wastes ink, paper etc.
3. Broken links, images. This is becoz some of the pages are under HTTPS , while the css and images are under http, which causes the page to disrupt.  Here care should be taken to check every link on the site, no matter how big it is.
4. From a design perspective, the consumer section of the website. i would love to see more people photos , this would ease me in dealing with this vendor. Everything is too corporate for a new consumer, this might keep him/her on the defensive.
5. No response to online forms. i dont blame the website for this, but i have had people who write to them over the online forms, dont get a response back. Now if this is a technical issue, then i would blame the website. but if its the bank not getting back , then it they need to work on their policies.

Technology Used :

1. it seems the site is done in JSP. im not sure about the backend, but i suppose Oracle, but definitely a SQL compliant db.
2. The Websites’s name servers are shared between Kems and Fasttelco.

Overall, its a great site, with loads of opportunity to improve and serve. Visit them here : www.e-gulfbank.com

im going to be reviewing, and discussing alot of websites from Kuwait, India and Goa to be specific. i wont be criticizing any one, but look at the good and  the issues on which how it can be sorted out.

these reviews will also help me personally to come up with outstanding solutions and business processes for online stores.

Since each mall has a different variety at each store, we hit Souq Sharq yesterday in an attempt to run through Coast and Oasis, Next, Kenneth Cole and Debenhams. There were some stores that had more of a variety as compared to their stocks in Avenues, such as Coast. I picked up two dresses from there and several other things and had a full fledged sense of satisfaction.

Until this morning that is. I looked online for the stock available at Coast, UK and my jaw dropped to see that a certain dress cost 45 pounds online, while here it costs 45 KD. What the hell? its on sale online as well as in the store here. http://www.coast-stores.com/VIVIE-D/S-COLOUR-BLOCK-BANDEAU/All-Sale/coast/fcp-product/2143397298

Livid as you can imagine, I did a little research online to come across this post from another blogger in Kuwait who noticed something similar at Zara http://eyepollution.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/inspired/ Apparently same deal- shoes at Zara available for 70 pounds online, available here for 70 KD.

I do recall being annoyed at Zara here in Kuwait. It was at Avenues where I had seen blatant KD stickers stuck atop the Euro price, and a quick calculation would tell you that everything seemed marked up by 10 whole KD. Has anyone else noticed it?

I think I’m going to start going to the stores to just figure out which size I want it in, and then order everything online.

I hate paperwork when it comes to Government offices, and I try to stay as much as possible away from them. but a recent event of me, changing my Residency in Kuwait.  I’m supposed to do all the necessary procedures to ensure a smooth Residency transfer from 18 to 17. This means im supposed to get my medicals done, fingerprinting etc….

For last 2 weeks, I have been running around taking copies,  mugshots of different facial expressions etc.  So today I had to get my fingerprinting done and also request a report that im not wanted by the police for any crimes.

So I go to this place in Sharq.  The building is rather old and the last I had entered it, was about 9 years back, when I had come to kuwait and it was a messy place at that time . Today surprisingly, it was really clean … there was  no crowd! i was there at about 8.45 am. the procedure was rather simple.

1. get some documents typed down below, you need 2 photos as well. the guys in the shops below take some quick criminal looking mugshots so you could use that. or carry some good looking ones in advance. Ensure you carry your passport and civilid too.

2. go to the second floor, you see a line of tables in a single row with women behind them.  Just submit these papers and your passport. They were quite helpful and spoke english!.

3. Then you go to a corner area, where you  meet this Police cop, who takes your fingerprints.  Its a messy task.  But he was really polite. He had read my papers and is like… “Are you a hacker” …. i smiled, and  said “no… im one of the good guys! .. he went on with a couple of topics and then wished me well.

4.  You need to come back to the same place later (depends on the days mentioned to you) to take your report!!.

Overall the whole process took about 1 hour.

We will put up more info on tomorrow if we can. Do something, if you can.

UPDATE:  THERE SEEMS TO BE SOME CONFUSION ON THIS INFO.  WE JUST LEARNT THAT,  THIS IS FOR U.S AND EUROPE ONLY,
RED CRESCENT KUWAIT IS TAKING DONATIONS IN THE FORM OF MONEY.  SORRY FOR THIS MISCOMMUNICATION!.

Here is the info for Red Crescent Kuwait:-

Telephone:  (+965) 24818084 – 24818085

Fax:  (+965) 24839114

P.O.Box 1359, Safat Code No. 13014

Cable: Hilahmer

Kuwait

I’m more of an open book as Rayboy the blogger instead of being  anonymous like many others. Many of my clients, friends and even my family know the person behind ”Rayboy” and even have a number to call up. One way its bad, that clients and every one know what my background life is like, and whats going on with the so called Dark IT guy who keeps talking “mambo-jambo” about IT and its ways.  But in a good way, customers,vendors,etc are more open to discuss issues that I face and it helps to get things sorted out immediately. They dont really worry about my reviews, etc. as they know I’m straightforward, and they are aware that they can contact me and clarify something immediately.

Recently, I met a couple of new customers and vendors, who have requested that I review their stuff. I usually ask them one question.. Why me?  What always surprises me is the same response I receive to every time I ask that question.

We hate bloggers!

1. They said, “Bloggers now take advantage of companies, they write ill of a product, claiming their own experience to be the whole truth thus destroying the reputation of the product (or organization/ company/etc) in the market. Companies usually agree when things dont work right or fail in certain areas which caused a failure in front of the consumer, but there is so much of ingredients which makes a product and service. Now just because one thing went bad, it doesnt mean the company is bad, or that all the products are bad.

2. They also mentioned that bloggers try to juice out discounts, freebies etc which one could think has made them utterly biased. This also becomes totally unfair to consumers who dont have blogs and have not faced such issues.

I was bit taken back by about 5 companies saying the same thing. It does gives bloggers a bad name. So guys, if you find something bad , do get into constructive criticism which helps the product or the company grow! Try not to lash out at people unless they have really offended you, refused to admit their mistake and not taken any measures to do some damage control.

I use Dreamweaver for all my web development projects. but ever since Adobe took them over, there are loads of errors.  Those facing loading errors with dreamweaver, this is the best place to sort them out.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/191/tn_19105.html#known_errors

KUWAIT CITY, Dec 23, 2009 (AFP) – The Kuwaiti parliament passed a new labour law on Wednesday that grants better rights and conditions for the 2.3 million foreign workers but does not scrap the controversial sponsor system.

The new law, approved unanimously by lawmakers including cabinet members, replaces a 45-year-old law that was criticised as being favourable to employers at the expense of workers.

The legislation provides more rights for workers in the private sector, including better annual leave, end of service indemnities and holidays.

It also sets tougher penalties, including jail terms, for businessmen who trade in visas or who recruit expatriate workers and then fail to provide them with jobs, or who fail to pay salaries regularly.

Kuwait is home to 2.3 million foreigners, more than two-thirds of them Asians, and 1.1 million citizens.

The bill requires the government to introduce a minimum wage for certain jobs, especially in the lower-paid categories.

During the debate, several MPs criticised the old law as being oppressive to labourers and favourable to employers.

The new law, however, fails to address the much-criticised sponsor system under which all foreign workers must be sponsored by a Kuwaiti employer, thus keeping expatriates at the mercy of their bosses.

Other oil-rich Gulf states apply similar systems.

Nevertheless, the law requires the government to set up a public authority that takes on the responsibility of recruiting workers from abroad.

Minister of Social Affairs and Labour Mohammed al-Afasi has repeatedly said that the emirate was considering a gradual end to the system to meet international labour standards, but little action has been taken so far.

It will only become operational after being endorsed by HH the Amir, following which its publication in the Kuwait Gazette will render it  effective.

But on our way back, we were heavy and unable to feel our toes due to sumptuous quantities of aforementioned delicacies, which in turn seemed to effect the decision making process of the mind on what to do next. As we past by Messila, it seemed the only option to stop  by the sea and run beneath giant pandas and an octopus in order to ward off what would otherwise be an utterly lethargic day. In order to avoid cars with arabic music blaring from speakers from the early 1900’s, we did wobble aka walk a bit, but despite that fact it turned out to be a completely languid day worshipping the television. But hey, at least I wrote this post eh?![

Once in a while, i take time out to help “eager” and “determined” friends who want to do something special for their communities. So i had “wardog” aka Blogger “grey”, who wanted help with his theme for his Indian Rock Site www.indianrockmp3.com . Personally im not all that a ROCK fan.. but working on his site, gave some good insights into the happening ROCK industry in India.

It took me a while to get the site up, “dave” one of my programmers involved in this project, got his magic working again, since i was quite busy with my own tasks. But finally after a month of testing, importing, fixing, debugging etc. the site is finally up! . Grey, was thrilled as ever. The Guy is determined to make this site the most happening thing on indian cyberspace. i love the jest the guy has for this.!

Do visit his site (www.indianrockmp3.com ) and lay down some comments there too.!

Goa Chitra Museum – Benaulim
For more details about this pic. Click Here

Saris in the window

The last few days have been a little hectic, between making resolutions, breaking them already; trying to get rid of alot of crap from 2009 to make space for crap of 2010 and also, hunting around for something to wear for a Bollywood themed get-together for New Years Eve.

I seriously underestimated the amount of Indian clothes available in Kuwait. I went to Indian heritage for the first time late November to buy something Indian for friends I was visiting in Europe. But alas, the lack of choice and the fact that Indians are generally tinier in comparison (thus only smaller sizes available) didn’t help.

The last few days I was frantically trying to fix me something appropriate, trying to keep in mind that New Years Eve night would be “slightly” cold. A dear friend offered to lend me a sari, and I thought I’d settle for that. But eventually you end up getting off work a little earlier and find yourself driving towards some place to shop at. So, I thought of stopping at Lulu’s as my secretary had recommended it for Indian stuff.

There were two sections upstairs, a sari section and a section for the dress-like-Salwar Kameez. There were simple ones and heavily embroidered garments in both sections ranging from 15 KD to 40 KD to more. The variety boggled the mind, especially mine which was just grasping the differences between tussar or tissue materials, Bandhini print and all this. I obviously couldn’t make up my mind, and called my secretary again, who told me to check out Souq Al Watya as well. What I didnt need were more options, but I ploughed along determined but completely clueless on how to get there. Souq Al Watya had 3 or 4 sari shops and I eventually stumbled upon the best one last, of course. The guy unfurled a few thousand saris that just didn’t work for me, until I stepped outside ready to give up when the sari in the display caught my eye. While he initially stated the price as 25, I finally got away with buying it for 15.

My friend draped it  in what is supposedly a Gujarati style with a twist- pleats at the back and the front, and the pallu falling over my shoulder in the front. It wasn’t as hard as I fathomed it would be handling the sari through the evening. The night was glitzy and colorful.  It was lovely that everyone made an effort to make it happen, and unmatched shoes were forgiven as finding  mojris in non Indian sizes was a feat.  

A true blue moon Bollywood night.

I have a lot of friends and family members, who come and take my downloads. So i end up with a lot of hard drives at home. i will start reviewing each of these devices. This time its the Buffalo Drivestation 1 TB external hard drive.

The Drive itself is extremely small,  45 mm Width x 175mm Height  x 154mm breath and weighs about 1 kG.

The Good
1. the internal drive is SATA II, unlike some which still have IDE though its outdated.
2. its quite sleek and for 1 Kilo it can easily fit in a small bag and made portable
3. the power adapter comes with a detachable plug so that you can fit it in different enivironments.
4. Comes with the following softwares, picasa, autosync, encryption softwar,eco-friendly manager  and some strange other softwares which i find basically useless.
5. it has some turbomode software, which says if you install it, it would speeden things up.. i highly doubt that.. you cant really push the limits of hardware, when it has bottlenecks like USB2.0
6. Its very quiet…
7. it supports UDMA Mode 6, which is Good

The Bad
1. its missing a Firewire slot…
2. Being powered by a seperate power adapter, i was expecting this to be cheaper, my friend got it for KD 36. i was expecting KD 28. a manually assembled one is about KD22.
3. Even though the box said transfer rate, was about 450 MBPs,  the transfer rate hardly went about 20MBPs
4. The Harddrive didnt have a very large buffer(34MB), so transfer rate would be naturally extremely high.
5. No Fan in the case, so it gets really hot, so its better to keep this in a cooler environment.
6. Cant handle a constant transfer, i had to copy about 900 GB worth of data, it used to disconnect every 2 hours, which meant i had to be physically prevent all the time to continue the transfer.. i dont really know why ..

Benchmark results
Average speed max = 74MBps
Heat = 49 degrees C. this is incomparison with my internal drives running at 26 degrees C.

Conclusion : i cant make any recommendations on this, since of the local price in kuwait. but if the price fell further, i would suggest it to people who dont care about reliablility of their data and just need a device to take large data from one place to another.

One of the most popular cartoon shows to hit the market has been Ben10, with posters, toys, franchises coming up all over the place. The Storyline is rather impressive, with the mix of humor, action and .. aliens!..

What surprised me is the business logic used in this cartoon series is more the concept used in “LOST Series” where the storyline flashes between the past and future, thus making it absorbing to watch, something which i considered difficult in “Lost” .  For me its a stress buster, something to watch when Hell breaks loose at work

im yet to see the movie Ben10 Alien Swarm, so will update you guys when i get a chance.

In an era , where Spams / Viruses / Trojans have become a part and parcel of life. The guys who are mostly hit are Mail Administrators..

Definition
Mail Administrators = IT Guys who take care mail servers like exchange, exim, lotus, imail and many others. Their sole job is to ensure you receive and send email to your clients, friends, families and also sometimes allow you to spam people with countless of forwards and other junk you like to tell people about.

When spams and viruses come and attack you. Mail Admins come up with their own forces of Defense. They end up putting firewalls, Mail filtering, RBL blocking an so on.. Gone are the days, where you can send an email in peace and you can ensure the receiver got it. Now its like …

- you send the email, then
- you call the person over the phone or sms… “Did you get my email”

- The other person would say… Yes…(then great) or NO
- If No…you would say.. maybe its on its way…(15 mins back)… if you dont get it please call me back

So.. if you notice, apart from the Email .. an SMS or a phone is needed a verbal confirmation whether the mail is come or not!!!.  The point of “Insecurity , that emails have not reached the other end, is becoming very popular now”. The Biggest cause of these is 3 things

1. Spams and Viruses
2. Mail Admins who have too strong defense setups
3. the user him/herself.

The Purpose of this article to tell everyone, whats happening there and how everyone can make email delivery more efficient.

1.  Dont wait last min to send the email, you have a 10 am deadline for a report…  you attempt to send the email at 9.55am. How sure are you that the recipient would get that email ? Email deliveries are theoretically  immediate, but with various filters,firewalls etc.. there is no longer that guarantee. Ensure you send your email atleast 30 mins in advance of deadlines.

2. BCC, and external email , if you have a gmail,hotmail etc.. Then BCC important emails to your address, so that you can check it as a guarantee that your emails have gone out.

3. PLEASE FOR GOD SAKE… dont forward attachments, look at this scenario.

Jerry works for a company of 100 employees. So we have 100 email accounts in this Company. The Company is a proud owner of 2 MB internet line, which is satisfactory for a company of that size. Jerry gets an interesting video of 4 MB from a friend outside his company. Jerry loves the video so much, that he decides to forward to his colleagues, he adds about 50 of his closet colleagues. and shoots out the email.

Next thing we know.. the network is hung up and we have extremely slow net. ………….why?

Jerry has sent his 4 MB email out (which is fine).. but now we have 50 people downloading this same email back into the company network.. now 50 X 4 MB = 200 MB!, 200 mb at the same time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!, So here we have important emails SLOW..queued etc etc!!!!!!!

4. Companies, just because you got that attractive domain name like,  email@yourcompany.com , Please dont go sending 1000’s of newsletters. Customers can block you or consider you as spammers if you force their inboxes with your promotions.. Once you get into Spam RBLs, its way tough to get you out of it!

5. Have a proper hosting support, Just becoz google , yahoo etc is giving you 20 to 30 GBs of webspace.. doesnt mean they will provide you immediate support in times of problems. Get a local hosting company, who can support you when you have mail problems. Reason being is that when mails dont go, the Mail admin cannot diagnoise something which is not in his control.

6.  PLEASE// buy an antivirus or tell your company to buy one… Living on Pirated antivirus scanners is one of the main causes of spams to originate from your computers and the company networks. this causes your IP addresses to be blacklists, so no matter how much clean mails you send.. all your mails will be considered as spams. This is worse in companies.. for example

a company has 100 users, but they all go out to the internet over 1 IP address through their router.. So the world sees the company as IP 62.123.12.12 , imagine user A in that company is infected and is sending out spams. Online spam blocks will see that IP 62.123.12.12 is sending out spams, and blocks it. Then User B who is a clean PC, is sending out genuine mails, the spam blocker will see .. oh its IP 62.123.12.12 again!… and will consider these as spam and block them as well. So please have updated and genuine Anti-virus or tell your IT guys to do so.

7. Avoid Notifications from Facebook, orkut, etc coming to your email. My Last Months Email Traffic stats was

41,250,012 – Emails Spam ( Blocked )
1,010,011 – Emails  Notifications (Orkut, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,etc) (Blocked)
219,181 – Forwards & Groups Emails(Not blocked) Total Size of emails  14.6 GB
72,199 – Autoresponders(Out on holidays,Thankyou, Autoresponders, Newsletters)(Not blocked)
21,818 – Genuine Emails(Not blocked)

As a mail admin myself, i dont understand why does everyone need Facebook etc notifications.. ? All it says.. that someone said something to you, click here to view.. doesnt that distract you from WORK? if you see the stats.. for Notifications its like 1,010,011 thats a lot.. on my servers i have blocked this.. but i dont know how many other servers its on.

Imagine, Facebook sending you postal mail, everytime it needs to notify you.. how much paper is that?

8.  CCing, the whole world! .. Many people have this habit.. of CC’ing everyone in the company.. anything they do or need to inform, Imagine the amount of emails which are spread around.. this is not only increasing the queue, but also spaming people who are not involved in the task or dont want to be involved.. its so annoying…!!

This is technical discussion made layman is a bit tiring.. so i will continue on part -2 later on… so till then .. be safe!

I’ve received an ipod shuffle from Rayboy (and his wife), a Canon Ixus, a dozen tabasco sauce bottles and lot more of what nots. Like ALOT.  For the first time in a long time, I didnt give him a watch that he wasn’t going to wear anyway nor anything eually corny, instead we borrowed his car to fix his wireless car key remote. He obviously knew we were upto more than that. It was an entire evening,a nd wasn’t enough to do everythign we wanted to. But that’s a good thing because next Christmas I’ll still know what to get him!

I’ll post the rest of this blog in pictures because y’all never seem to reach down to the comments section otherwise :-|

Evil Knievel who barely never blogs anymore celebrated his birthday on the 24th and we had a little “get-to-gether” at my place. Egg nog, lots of people and a few grouchy neighbours peeked out windows as the smokers congregated outside on the patio and got louder than on an average day. Very festive, indeed!

The gifts piled on as the evening rolled on, and there were little keyholder thingies that were hollow within, and you capped in a chit with information. There was a PS3 game, a year long DSL connection, some home decor, a nunchuk for the wii, some other things I probaby don’t know about and a Guitar Hero, guitar and all! That was really cool. I got an exclusive preview of the birthday boy playing The Unforgiven and video’d it just for ya! Amazing animation, isn.t it?!

Apart from my recent post about what i need to give up for 2010.. im actually planning my year ahead…  on how life would be, on what could happen. 

One of the biggest changes in 2010, is that i would take up a new job and slow down my IT career as right now its doing a 200 mph and its getting to be tough. I have alot of clients which i manage, but i feel i will be keeping only those who really value IT technology and is ready to spend for the betterment of their infrastructure and growth… (trust me i have clients who have P3 machines and expect to run the latest Autocad on it..)

One of the highlights of 2010, is that i become a Father(parent), and learn a new experience, which i see many in my generation already experiencing and loving it. a plan which i always had.. but no time to work on it. Life has been good, a quest for career, growth has been ever demanding for last 8 years of my life.  The concept of generating free time to love and to learn is needed for the hour as the years force life to become faster, brutal and every demanding.

i will be giving a lot of time to reading, writing, blogging and technical reviews, which will keep my ever planning “mind” busy!. Keeping many family members & friends together who were always around with me , will be one of my highest priorities for 2010. Also guiding those who need help and advice will always be there. my health and prayer life will be given a considerate amount of time.

The worst things to come in 2010 for me, is i will loose touch with many family members, who have haunted my growth and ability to reach out.  Charity organisations(unless proven) will have no place in my time or life.  Business Deals which will not benefit the customers, or if the customer doesnt see growth in their own plans, wont be taken.

My Companies back in Goa.. will be expanding, growing and settling problems they face will be one of my day 2 day tasks. While one of my own web projects www.goenche.com will become a full feldged company by then. So the year looks exciting as it seems.. lets hope for the best!!!