thecruisemaniac.com

Photo credits Optical Illusion

The Cinque Terre — five picturesque fishing villages perched on Mediterranean hillsides, splendidly brushed in sun-washed colors.

Or so say websites and it truly a paradise on earth…  Ever since I saw this place on the way back from Rome, I’ve been soo wanting to come here and spend a couple of days and trek along the cliffside.  And this petty dream has come true today… with my generous PM offerring to give tomorrow off!  Friends heading to Rome and I’m headed to the Liguria province where Cinque Terre is located.

For those that’re not really comfortable with Italian, heres what Cinque Terre means: Cinque (Chink - kweh) meaning 5, and Terre (Therre) meaning land.  And it is… the paradise consisting of 5 small villages from south of the coast to north namely: Riomaggiore, Manarola, Cornigilia, Vernazza, Monterosso al Mare.

I’ll be spending 3 days at Riomaggiore and covering as much of the rest of the coastline by foot and by train.  This is gonna be an awesome trip!!!  Expect some good photos when I get back.

’til then… Ciao!!!!

This trip I have to definitely blog about!  Innsbruck’s a place thats long been on my bucket list and finally it’s a strike!  Two lovely days at Innsbruck! The alps is just too lovely to look at!  And getting caught in the Euro 2008 football frenzy is just too incomparable!!!

A few snapshots:

The rest of the innsbruck story is here on my flickr stream.  Its a quick and small post, but then yeah, Pictures would be better in explaining the experience!!!  I’m at a complete loss of words!!!

The plans this weekend: Innsbruck, Austria!

Image Courtesy stetre76 on Flickr.

No Euro 2008 matches happening this weekend! Nevertheless, its gonna be a cool B-) weekend! Pics will be uploaded to Flickr after I get back!

Until then, Chao…

A quick update on the activities over the last 3 weeks!

Week 1: Rome, Pisa

Week 2: Basilica di Superga, Torino

Week 3: Venezia

That has been it! A lot of touring, some very interesting places, Some cities held back in time (Roma), Some interesting incidents, Some very lovely people for Company!  It has overall been 3 awesome, out of the world quality weekends!!!

Some of the photos are here.  The rest are at home… and I will upload them as I find time!!!

And oh! I’m visiting Innsbruck, Austria this weekend!!! B-)  And sadly, I dont have the tickets to any football match of the Euro 2008 cup!!!

The Colosseum, Pic courtesy tjsuresh

Off to Rome tonight! I will be spending 2 full days at rome and then visiting Pisa on Monday on the way back to turin.  Lucky us, Monday is a National Holiday for Italy on occassion of Foundation of the Italian Republic (I) .  So, advance wishes for a Happy Birthday, Italy!!

Thanks to colleagues at work, we got the Trenitalia tickets at dirt-cheap rates! 65€ per person for the entire Turin->Rome->Pisa->Turin trip! Thank you guys! Grazie!!!

Thejesh a.k.a. @thej pointed us to Youth hostels in Rome which was again a total boon! Dirt cheap rates for quite decent accomodation!  Thankyou dude…

The Leaning Tower of Pisa, Pic courtesy dgmfotos

Thanks to @Netra, who patched me up with @hanisha who stays in Pisa, we have a guided tour in the works!  This is going to be a good weekend!!!

God bless Social Networking!!! Roma, I cometh!!! Let the Race begin!!! B-)

Visitors to the blog would first notice the theme change that has happened.  Yesterday night, i upgraded my WP installation from 2.5 to 2.5.1 as there was supposedly a security patch that was coming through with the upgrade.

As usual, wordpress blazed through the upgrade with no hiccups whatsoever and I was done with ftp-upload, upgrade, one-click, all that in under 5 minutes.  And then When I looked at the website I realised that I’ve been using the black-gold theme for quite some time now.  So here goes, a quick theme change.  The current one is called Brilliance by Jai Nischal Varma of Blog-Oh-Blog.  He has a wide array of really good looking widget-ready and browser-agnostic themes on his site and Brilliance was the one I picked up to use for a temporary period of time.  Till Navjot and I are through with designing our own theme.

The design-a-theme-in-12-hours thingy never went anywhere beyond 4 hours… navjot got busy, I got sleepy, but the theme is coming along good… and we’re both learning and enjoying the theme creation process.

That theme will be put up on this site once its done and production capable! Thats a term I pickedup from work

Till then, Chao…

Yeah, I know, my twitter page has been updating things like this for a long time (9 days exactly) and yeah, I’m in Torino, Italy!!!! My first ever Foreign destination!!! W0000000000t!!!!!

After 2 failed and futile and lossy attempts to get here, I finally got to Turin last friday (16-May-2008) after a 10 hr flight to paris, 6 hours of wait and another 2 hours by air to the Casselle International Airport, Torino.

I’m here for the next 2.5 months and am gonna definitely enjoy every single moment of it…  Oh, but the language is a serious PITA issue… Its very very very rare to find an italian that speaks english!  This goes for situations in the office too…  With your manager saying “I go take dump and mail you!“, ROFL’s and LOL’s are always around

And then there’s italian women!  Ooh! Mama!!! Whoa!!! w0000000000t!!! Bling!!!  There… that says it all!!!

Oh! Oh!!! There’s pizza vegetariana… 10 inch radius of awesome goodness!!! Shmmmmmack!!! I just luuuuuuuuuurvvvve it!!!  Oh yeah!!! The best part, getting up in the morning, and having a fight with your roomies on what to make for breakfast and lunch and then deciding that we’ll cook only for lunch and have conflakes for breakfast. Everyday! Thats’s definite fun!!!

And… a truckload of sight-seeing, no… not the women part! the historical monuments, churches, architectures part!!! Sheeesh!!! you dirty people!!! ;-)  We’re already done with the women part!

Had the chance to attend a rock-concert by a local band from Torino called Supsonica… And they played some of the best electro-rock that I’ve heard!!! Loads of electronic, Loads of Guitar and Awesome percussion!

Yeah, its turning out to be a whale of a trip! Plans are on to go to Rome this weekend… Probably to venice the next and the to Hokkenheim for the F1 race thats scheduled next month. And then come back and attend 3 continuous nights of rock-music! This is gonna be loaded.

As far as work goes, the “thing” that I was sent here to do… we’ll I cant work if I cant login to the servers can I???  So that pretty much sums up my stay so far in Torino, Italy.

For quick updates as I feel them, check them out on my twitter page here.  For photos, check out my flickr page here.

And till then, Grazié, and Chao!

This is my first blog post from the ever-awesome BCB6.  And on Day 2, I’m at a session by @braindead_in.

The first point mentioned by Rajiv is thus: Incoming VOIP termination call into a PSTN / PLMN network is not permitted by TRAI.

Rajiv is proposing a VOIP group mailing list which can probably list possible solutions.  This is turning out to a very interesting discussion.

Pradeep asked a lovely question: Whats the penalty of making an PSTN terminated VOIP call.  How many days in jail, how much fine et. al.

The basic reason for this issue is the safety / security of the money in the hands of the officials.

And as yet, yes, VOIP is a multi-billion dollar jackpot in the waiting and its sad that we’re sitting on a goldmine and are not interested in making it more worthy!!!

Sunrise today morning… I dunno why it felt special!
- Taken at 6:33 AM on April 16, 2008 - cameraphone upload by ShoZu

I went on to upgrade my blog to wordpress 2.5 yesterday night and I really seem to like it now. The most evident of changes is to the admin dashboard which is really neat and clean and much more organised… It does scroll more than before but then WTH… its cool. And I’m choosing to leave the default blue colours on. They are definitely refreshing everytime I look at them…

The upgrade as the Wordpress team puts it, its just a 5 minute process…

1. Backup your database in-case things might go wrong… (Believe me, they wont!!! )
2. Deactivate all plugins from the admin panel so that they might not create problems!!!
3. Fire up FileZilla, traverse to your wordpress directory, delete wp-admin and wp-include folders.
4. Upload the new wp-admin and wp-include folders and continue overwriting the other files…
5. Take care as to what you’re overwriting from the wp-content folder… You might want to save the settings for the older plugins / themes / etc…
6. Assuming your blog is at abc.com/blog, point your browser to abc.com/blog/upgrade.php to migrate your wordpress mysql database to suit the new 2.5 version.
7. And you are done…

There are some things I noticed that’ve given me a lot of ease in handling my blog:

1. The Plugins section can now not only point to newer versions of plugins but also update them in one click… No more downloading the plugin from a 3rd party website, unzip, ftp upload, detect, activate… W00t!!!
2. Lots of Ajaxy goodness!!!
3. Widgets support built-in… No more hunting for specific Widget-enabled themes…
4. All my old themes seem to work… No breakages so far!!!
5. Multi-file uploader… And its flash javascript, I-Frame based!!! Looks cool! And the progress bar is live… Double W00t!!!
6. This is a guess: Because the wp-core has been tweaked well, as I read on other forums, it must be giving much faster page loads for the viewers… You peeps temme about this. The cache is being built with every ping… And i guess it’s gonna be waaay faster once the cache starts spitting pages!!!

The Wordpress team has done an amazing job with Wordpress 2.5. Congrats guys!!!