Posts Tagged ‘Chennai’
Chennai Tweet-up
Yes atlast after missing the first tweet-up which was held sometime back, I was able to attend this one. Let me list the people who attended the tweet-up. They are:
I was in a fix there whether to write everyone’s real names or not but then I thought twitter handles are way better. I was thinking of putting everyone’s display pictures but decided against that too since I didn’t want to put people’s picture without their permission. So anyways back to the tweetup, sadly I was the last to arrive. I felt kind of dumb about the fact that I didn’t know where Mocha was even though it was near my college and the fact that I am a college dude. The only one I could even remotely recognize was Sathya because of all the pictures that I have seen of his in twitter. As soon as I reached the first thing everyone started commenting was how different I look from my display picture. Narayanan said that I don’t look like a rowdy type guy and neither am I tall (:P cant help that) at least that is what he and others thought after looking at my picture and the real me. When everyone started talking about themselves I didn’t even tell what course I was doing. LOL didn’t find it interesting enough. Balaji really gave us some cool information on what he was working on. I really felt good that labsji was there as Sathya had put it, “ we was honoured he was there with us”. Then Palani talked about himself and actually kept it a bit short. When Ashish’s turn came everyone’s ears were up since everyone wanted to know what happened to his blog and he gave a quite big explaination on what went wrong. We only came to know later how much he earned by blogging and that had all of us in a shock. Perhaps the most interesting introduction was of Narayanan, sounded more or less like some cool CEOs climbing the ranks story where he started out working with MBA guys even before finishing his college. His life story was quite fun to listen to. Then it was Sathya’s chance and we came to know how he ended up at 3i. Then Gayathri talked about what she worked on and where she worked. She works with coding and stuff and Narayanan who was on phone just came to make sure he heard that right (Don’t know why :P).
Narayanan ordered Pasta with white sauce and Pasta with red sauce also something called Vertigo which was a huge piece of chocolate cake or something. Balaji ordered a tropical smoothie, Gayathri ordered hot chocolate and I ordered black forest shake which tasted funny but was still good. We all dug into pasta and Vertigo except Balaji who refrained from eating solid food(I forgot to ask why, my bad). As Narayanan had said the Vertigo was simply brilliant. We then talked about music, musical instruments, @cruisemaniac and @daaku, India TV, Aaj Tak, Bomb Blasts,my ICICI probs and some more stuff. Meanwhile Sathya installed Twittai on Gayathri’s phone and we advised Narayanan to opt for Xperia X1 rather than HTC G1(Android Phone). One funny thing was after ordering her hot chocolate half an hour before me she got it at least 10 minutes after I got mine, which was bad. Palani was the first to leave since he had to go somewhere else for dinner. The second to leave was Balaji. Funny thing was all of us stood up when he was going, guess respect comes from within for some people without knowing. Guess when we heard how much Ashish earned from his blog sent us in a shocked state, everyone was keen to know what he did for it. He was talking something cool that I didn’t listen to properly. As Gayathri had to leave by 11:00 pm train to Bangalore, we finished the tweetup at around 10:00 pm. We walked out Narayanan helped Gayathri get a auto-rickshaw. That reminds me we even discussed about the auto-rickshaw fares and how they charge people here. Then Ashish left in a auto-rickshaw. After that Sathya and Narayanan went together on Narayanan’s bike. Then I walked to Sterling road to catch a auto-rickshaw.
Well that definitely wrapped the whole tweetup. Sorry for the bad image just doodled it in 1 minute.
College, Mobiles and Cameras
I have been in college for more than 4 months now and like many other college going students in India have been instructed not to carry a mobile phone with a camera into the college by our college authorities. I am one of those people who don’t care if we have a camera in our mobile but do need a good enough GPRS facility, nice resolution, JPG image support, mp3 ringtones and Java facility. So if you want all this you just can’t take a mobile to college because any mobile with these facility ends up having a camera, at the least a VGA camera. Since I am a internet freak I had one of these kinds of phones and I ended up loosing it to the college authorities(even though we are allowed to bring cameras into college). I really have no problem with that fact that they took my mobile phone and neither do I want to write blaming them because that will be too stupid. But I wanted to point out some details for people who might find this interesting.
Nowadays mobile phones as cheap as of Rs. 2500 and above have camera. But many high end mobiles don’t have them(not that we can buy them). 
Camera with a mobile phone is not a luxury now but actually a necessity according to many people. People demand it since many people use mobile phones as their primary camera. The way mobile has been developing I am sure the day is not far when mobiles phone will not be made without camera. All mobiles will have camera. I guess this would happen in nearly 5-7 years in India. I guess at that time they will just simply ban mobile phones in colleges.
Woodcut Artist
I love to write about important people I meet now and then. It feels good when I am able to tell people about the interesting things that have happened to me or interesting people that I have met. I recently met a woodcut artist from America. She was here as part of the Fullbright program to teach art students at the Government Arts college in Chennai about printmaking and drawing. Her name is Marcia A. Neblett
Our art Professors seemed to have been quite interested with it, so we were given the chance to meet her. We went to Lalit Kala Academy here in Chennai where she had her works exhibited for everyone to see. She was also there was very kind enough to show us her works. She is a wonderful lady, her art reflects many things. I found that her Woodcut painting, made out of blocks of wood cut and then slopped with paint and applied onto paper, was awesome.
The Search for a Helmet
I was actually not supposed to be posting this, I had been writing another post but really this is something I had to post. There is a new rule by the Tamil Nadu Government; which makes the wearing of Helmets compulsory for both the rider and the pillion rider. I had been bugging my dad for three-four days to get one before they go out of stock and my dad as usual didn’t even care for what I say. When I came home today and told him that tomorrow is 1st June(when the rule gets into effect) he goes OH!! Then I and my dad went on for search of a helmet.
I should have taken my camera with me, all the stores that sold Helmets were filled with people. Even the ones that are not in the city hub were full of customers and had no Helmets left since many people bought them. My dad I went all the way to T. Nagar(Shopping Heaven Hell). Then we directly went to Satans Pit(Sarvana Stores) there. It seemed they were stocking helmets. The worst part of this tiring exercise of pushing ourselves through the crowd and traffic was that none of the helmets left there fit my head(I have a really big head) and we couldn’t buy a smaller one. It took me around 30 minutes to get past the whole bunch of people standing next to the place they had the helmets. When I at last got out of it, my dad wasn’t convinced that they didnt have bigger ones and stood there till I dragged him out of there.
It was really a pain to get back home as the traffic was killing. So in the end we wasted around 2 hours(7:30 pm to 9:30 pm IST) and came home with nothing. So this means my dad will have to take his car out even when only one other person has to travel with him, waste of Petrol.
The worst thing is that from tomorrow onwards the prices of helmets will reach sky high. These people will just hoard it and try to extract more money from people. Anyways next time I go Helmet hunting I am taking camera with me.
Chennai Techspot Meet
Deep and Ashish had come to Chennai for the BlogCamp Unconference, so we had decided why not we meet here and make it a Techspot Forum members meet. With that thought we met at their room in The Residency Hotel. I reached the hotel around 6:00 pm and was lurking around here and there till 6:30 pm and went to their room at 6:30 pm. Ashish opened the door witha big smile and I found Qwerty and Sathya(Sathish) sitting in the chairs and Deep behind his laptop who was trying to do red eye reduction with his photos from BlogCamp which I tried too but was unsuccessful at it. Then we started talks Ashish ordered some pesticides(Pepsi and Miranda), we were first talking about GNU and Red Hat Courses and some how got diverted to the topic of me being a loner and all that but they did give me some things to ponder on which I am pondering on. I came to know that I have lot to learn about Open Source Software and also learnt how different is the perspective about linux from a programmer’s point of view and a user’s point of view. We talked about a lot of things but I forgot to ask Ashish how his kids were(damn me). Then they had to empty the room by 8:00 pm and they packed up and we were ready to move. We went down and had a small chat once again I gave Deep and Ashish directions to go to a restaurant they had seen earlier and wanted to have dinner there. I couldn’t join in and niether could Qwerty or Sathish as Sathish lived far away, QM was supposed to go somewhere and me I was just keeping a promise to be back before 9:00 pm. Well we then bid farewell to them Sathya left for his home and I and Qwerty went to a bus stop where he and I got Rickshaws(seperate) to head back home. I got of at the wrong place and went walking the rest distance which wasn’t much(I got down at wrong spot purposely because I love walking). This way our meet ended and I must say I was really satisfied by the Meet next time I will definately make it to the BlogCamp and will be with them for a longer time so that we can talk about lot more things. Its nearly 12 am and they might have boarded the plane by now I guess. There is something else too that I forgot to mention Deep had taken SEO for Blogs Session in the BlogCamp and I can’t believe that I missed it. Now this makes my resolution much more stronger that I am definately going to attend the next year’s BlogCamp where ever it takes place. So i will keep editing this post to add links to others who post on it specially Deep and Ashish as they have the photos.
Links:
Techspot Thread
Yeah and I am proud to say that I was the first to post about the meet after it has taken place.
Well if the topic didnt ring any bell then you might want to take a look here. Well the site seems down to me as of now but I am going to tell you what it is anyways. Well Its one of India’s biggest bloggers meet ever organised. I am sad that I came to know about it from newspaper rather directly from net. Well as it has been in India chennai has the highest number of bloggers. Many of them of them have come together to organise this event. The event is supposed to be gathering of many famous bloggers of chennai. Kiruba Shankar is also organizing this meet. Sorry for my ignorance but I never knew who was Chennai’s most popular blogger and it seems Kiruba Shankar is the guy. They seem to have great plans for this meet including making Robert Scoble attend it or he is probably going to attend it. IT doesnt seem to be like a any normal meet where you go and drink, eat and have fun. They seem to hold workshops and make it a bit more useful meet. They want all the bloggers to share whatever they have learnt from blogging and share their ideas. If I have read the newspaper right, it seems “Harvard University” is supporting it through their “Global Voices Online“. It seems from the news article that the plan has been well layout. I wait to see what it brings and how many people will join it.
Before I forget the Blogcamp is supposed to be held on September 9th and 10th
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