The demented and jealous Sun enters as the unsuspecting Sab works hard on the comp

Sun back stabbing poor Sab

“Et tu Sun?….aaaahh!! help!!!” - Sha and Sab are shocked and scream for help…but alas…

Sun then targets Sha and chokes him on the bed

Sab is barely alive…and this time Sun goes for the throat

Once Sab and Sha are out of the picture, Sun goes on to steal their code and ideas

As Sun is about to leave with some gadgets, he notices the camera capturing his every action

 A desperate Sun commits suicide in front of the camera…or did he?

No one knows what happened next…

Apart from these photos, nothing was recovered. No bodies. No code. No idea…

Wait a minute…the idea with quite a few modifications recently resurfaced at some distant land…could it be….??

Disclaimer: All characters are purely fictional and any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental.

Office is good fun now, the pre-annual day events (cultural/sports/literary) are in full swing and as usual I’m in the middle of it all – In the organising committee and also managing the event portal and some of the events. Looks like nothing’s changed from school and college days, when I was in the organising committee for all the fest and other activities!

Hmmm…after a long time will be going for a Microsoft event again, this weekend at Hyderabad for the Microsoft Student Partner Meet (SPM). Should be good fun to meet all old champs and ambassadors and the new ones! The last SPM was held at Golden Palms Spa and Resort in Bangalore and was one helluva experience! Hopefully this one will be as good, if not better!

Well looks like the link is back again, so gotta rush!

Saw the movie Hostel last friday night. It was another dark, freaky, horror movie. Not the ghost kind of horror…but real chilling, gory, violent, shocking kinda stuff. The movie comes with the tagline - ”Welcome To Your Worst Nightmare” and sure has some hellish scenes in them.

Went out with project team mates last Saturday after some training at work and had nice fun! After a long time went to the Microsoft office for a meeting regarding the student community. Met a lot of old friends and enjoyed pizza and later I took my friends out to Coffee Day.

Ghana, Rags, Rishabh and me at Garuda mall
(Also in the pic – Sunil’s S2 IS and the all important diary with all the trip details)

After a lot of talking of every other topic and a little brain-storming about the trip over lunch and some awesomely yummy dessert we came to some conclusion and if all goes according to plan we will be leaving on Friday (28th April) evening to Munnar and Alleppey and return on Tuesday (2nd May) morning!

The next three weekends of mine are now booked for trips and incidently in three different states! This weekend being the Kerala trip. Next weekend to Coorg (in Karnataka) for a colleagues’ wedding and the weekend after that to Rameshwaram (in Tamil Nadu) for a religious trip as conclusion to my earlier Kashi trip.

Now I just can’t wait for this week to end and for Friday to come. Monday morning blues already! Sigh!

After creating several draft posts, I am finally getting around to complete and publish the post about my visit to Wonder La on 12th February.

Sharath had stayed back at my place on 11th (Saturday) night and we had a great time watching various Coupling episodes and movies through the night. We had earlier been to a dhaba for dinner. Sunil was supposed to join us, but got held up someplace with his dad.

On Sunday (12th Feb) as part of the (so-called) Microsoft student champ “reunion“, Sunil, Sharath, Ghana, Raghavan and myself went to Wonder La amusement park! The park was simply amazing and we had loads of fun on the various land rides and later in the water rides!

On Sunday morning, Sharath left my place around 9:45 AM to go home and get ready and I was to pick him and the rest after a while. After some laziness and delays (as usual), I finally managed to pick everyone up by 11:15 AM or so and head off towards Bidadi on Mysore Road, where Wonder La is situated. The drive was great, since the roads were recently laid and were very smooth and there wasn’t much traffic!

We reached the park by around 12:15 PM [the park timings are 11 AM to 8 PM] and headed for the ticket counter. We all paid Rs. 480 for the entrance and though Sharath had his college id card, they said the student discount applies only if we come in groups of 20 or more with a letter from the insitution…!

Wonder La entrance – somehow we didn’t miss Ranga!

Anyway once inside we took a look at the park map and decided to go on all the rides marked as ‘High Thrill Rides’, but before we got to them we first checked out the crazy cars

Wonder La has some of the best land rides I have ever been on, including ‘Wonder La Bamba’, ‘Drop Zone’, ‘Insanity’, ‘Hurricane’, the highly enjoyable ‘Y-Scream’ and the mother of all rides – ‘Maverick’!

Y-Scream [above] and Maverick! [below]

We spent all afternoon on the land rides and had a great time. We wanted to go on them some more, but we were too exhausted and hungry. So finally around 4 we went for lunch at one of the restaurants in the park. After lunch we went back to the changing rooms and got ready for round two of the action – the water rides!

View of the water attractions

There were a whole lot to check out in the water park – from small slides and buckets over turning on your head to the wave-generator and the high thrill water slides that twisted and turned and some just dropped straight down and deposited you in the pool at the bottom. We had a great time in the (warm!!) water, but somehow felt the rides weren’t quite up to the mark. They were thrilling, no doubt, but not smooth. We felt the rides were a bit rough and not that fine tuned, especially when compared to the water park at Mangalore, which (pretty much) the same group visited (except for Rags) last year. Nonetheless we had a great time splashing about and made it a point to go on all the water rides. Finally around 6:30 PM we concluded the water rides with the same ‘Wonder Splash’ that we started off with and headed back to the changing rooms.

Wonder La Tower and Sky Wheel

Before we left we wanted to to check out the ‘Sky Wheel’, which is this huge 30 metre giant wheel on top of a 50 metre clock tower! We reached the top in time to see a beautiful sun set. The ride itself was slow but the view was simply great. We could see the whole park (and all the solar panels on top of every building, which is what the park uses to keep the water at room temperature) and we could also see for miles around! It was the perfect way to end a great day.

The sun sets [above] and we pose [below]

The park is not 100% complete and we saw lots of construction work still going on and many ries still being assembled, so it is only going to get better! The only ride the park is missing is a great roller coaster. I loved the place and have started recommending the place for all get togethers with various friends and colleagues! I would love to visit the park again (and again), especially for the awesome and high thrill land rides.

Check out the photos taken at the park here

I’m all excited about that! I’ve heard from a lot of people that it is a great place and there are some awesome rides to experience!

If you are a champ and want to attend and want more details then do contact me, Ghanashyam or Sunil.

Windows Live Messenger looks just about ok at first glance, nothing great that wasnt available elsewhere earlier. The ads are quite annoying though and another annoying feature is when I change my status to Appear Offline, all my conversation windows are closed automatically. This means that if I want to continue chatting with my friends after changing status to appear offline, I need to reopen a chat window with them. And finally when both my friend and I appear offline, we weren’t able to chat! We only got each other’s messages after we changed our status back to Online. I hope Microsoft resolves these issues before the final release.

I’ve also got the Windows Liveâ„¢ Mail beta invite and will post about it soon.

I attended the launch of Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006 yesterday. Being a Microsoft Student Ambassador, I got special reservations (thanks to Deepak Rajendran at Microsoft) for the ready launch tour! The main highlight of the event was ofcourse Bill Gates!

A huge crowd was expected and the community members (including me) were asked to come early, so we met at the entrance by around 10:30 AM. Security was very very tight. My car was stopped four times from the entrance of Palace Grounds (the venue) till the parking spot and there was more to come. There were umpteen restrictions – no carrying mobile phones, cameras, bags, books, jackets(!), etc. etc. There were many disgruntled developers who had to leave all their belongings in their cars or at a counter. Getting inside wasn’t exactly a walk in the park – it was more like walking into an American airport after 9/11. We had to carry a print-out of a bar-code that we got when we registered online. There were security checks every ten feet or so, where we were asked to show the bar code printout, a photo id card and a business card. Then there was a metal detector check and a frisk and after getting a wrist band at the registration desk, we were finally let into the venue. Phew!

it was around 11:45 AM now and we were taken straight to the food counter! We were each given one huge cake box, consisting of a veg puff, cake, frooti, chips, sandwich and some paper napkins. Like the paper napkins, the rest of what was in the box was also inedible.

We were then taken to our “VIP seats”, right at the front and after an initial confusion as to which VIP area was for us, we settled into our proper seats and devoid of mobiles, books and only with each other for company, we started our nearly 3 hour wait for the event to start! They were playing some good music to keep us occupied and I had a great time cracking jokes with Ranga and Ghana. Also spoke for a long time with Nitin and Pratheek.

Finally at 3:00 PM, there were some announcements and the event started with a special performance by Parikrama, who sang a special song for the Indian developers

After this song came the moment everybody was waiting for, the announcer made a nice announcement…then drum roll…And onto the stage walked Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, Bill Gates! It was a nice moment and he got a very warm welcome and standing ovation from the assembled developers!

Bill Gates spoke for a while about the products that were being launched and then went back stage. There were some presentations by other Microsoft employees and then Bill G returned with Sheila Gulati for a Q & A session. People from around the world had submitted their questions at the Microsoft website and a few of them were picked for this round. Lots of interesting questions were asked like when was the last time Bill coded (apparently quite often to learn, but a completely shipped product was long back – 1983); what his foundation is doing; advice for Indian developers and entrepreneurs, etc… Bill was once again given a standing ovation after this round and he then left for another meeting. Next there were more cool demos about the new products.

Thus ended the formal part of the event and coming up next was more performances by Parikrama. It was rather sad to see that most of the Indian developers don’t appreciate good music and most of the 5000 strong crowd dispersed, eager to collect their take aways for the day (a copy of VS 2005 and SQL Server trial edition and a belt pouch), except for around a 100 or so enthusiasts, who stayed back for some awesome music and a totally rocking performance!

We finally left by around 7:00 PM after a Student Partner meet outside in the Palace Grounds, but not before making plans for the evening! More on that shortly!

I cleared my second Microsoft certification exam earlier today -
Exam 70-229: Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition.

I now need to write one more paper to become a Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD), which is the XML Web Services and Server Components exam. Two more papers after that and I will be a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD). Hmm…lots of exams coming up for me…and I thought was done with exams after graduating!

It is now just over 2 months since I joined Perot Systems. The last 2 months was spent in undergoing various technical and non-technical training. The technical training was primarily focussed on various Microsoft technologies and .NET in particular.

It was an interesting and at times tedious 2 months, especially the 9AM to 8.30PM Monday to Saturday schedule, but I learnt quite a lot! The batch (TIP 2005) I was in, was good fun and we had a lot of good times together!

Today, our batch was taken to ECC (a very calm and beautiful place at Whitefield) and had various team building exercises. Major TP!

TIP 2005 Batch 1 – Perot Systems

Last Saturday, we had our first Microsoft Certification Exam –

Exam 70-315: Developing and Implementing Web Applications with C# and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, after clearing which, I am now an MCP -

I also have my second MCP exam coming up shortly -

Exam 70-229: Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Enterprise Edition.

This is going to be my last day or two as a trainee and sometime this week I will be allocated to a project, along with my batchmates.

I guess my life is starting a new phase now as the last two months were more like a 9th semester rather than work.

I wonder how it will be…

Well lucky you! You needn’t wonder so much, because you can read all about it here, as it unfolds, straight from the horses mouth!