The Mauritian Tuition

The start of a new year implies a lot of different things to different people. For me its about keeping my resolutions whilst for many secondary students new year means new teachers , new mates , new subjects , new uniform ....and new private tuitions.

I remember how private tuition selection used to be in my days , we used to talk between friends which tuition had the greatest concentration of cool people or which tuition professor was the most brilliant ever ...

But then there was those private teachers that had built a small empire from mass teaching school kids and this is why am writing this blog. I know at least a handful of these so-called "semi-god" teachers .Parents love them and other teachers worship them. From my personal experience I have only one word for these individuals "escroc" !

There is no such thing as mass teaching with a small room filled with knowledge hungry teenagers. Come on tuition are meant to be given to help a student in a specific area where he or she requires more attention. Now how can an idiot with 30 students in his room be able to achieve that in 1hr every week ?

On top of that some of these "teachers" are so unreachable that you actually need to book an interview for your child with him. I know of one star (etoile filant) which used to give GP tuitions in my days...and apparently still does. The guy was on every parent's tuition wish list for their kids. Kids who were unable to squeeze into his tuition used to feel as if they would never pass the General Paper exam. I got the "privilege" to be in his class at school .... guess what he did to make pupils learn to write essays ... well he gave them the essays to learn ..pre-mache.. the ones where he has already thought about what should be written.. so dumb.. I would say its a sacrilege to our freedom of thinking.. come on make your pupils creative and make them think for themselves.

I got the incredible chance to have a great GP tuition teacher on the other hand ,called Mr. Kudrath ,which I respect a lot . I never got the chance to thank him for allowing me to express my gratitude and thankfulness for helping me develop a creative and scientific approach into writing essays and in other every day life situations.

Mr. Kudrath instead of having a room of 30 students would have only around 5-6 people at max and he would take the time to talk about different subjects and allow you to express your feelings and opinions. I really enjoyed going to his tuitions that was something really worthwhile in my teenage life.

Thanks also to Mr Luximon and Mr Payandee for maths and physics if it wasn't for these two people I would not have developed a love for solving problems . Parents if you are reading this don't go for the teacher with the most students go for the teacher with the teaching vocation.

1st of Jan 2007 in Mauritius

I woke up late usually by 6:30 am already on my feet but this morning was hard maybe because I slept on a different bed , had to giveaway my room to my cousins as they were crashing at my place for the night.

My head is still full of last night's new year celebrations at the Caudan waterfont. 2006 had a better fireworks than the one we had on 2005 which was spoilt by rain , not may people had gone out of their homes that year..

Several people after midnight struck where lighting really big and dangerous fireworks on the esplanade and placed them in water bottles before setting fire. Now yesterday ,as is the case still this morning, was very windy due to a cyclone passing in our region and many a time the water bottle would fall down or move resulting in the firework going towards a crowd on the ground or towards the Caudan Labourdonnais hotel. In one instance a tourist at the top of Labourdonnais hotel in his room was quietly enjoying fireworks when one of them fireworks went straight from below directly into his room , needless to say the guy was really frightened.

Strangely yesterday I didn't have much problems sending SMS or making calls around midnight on the CellPlus network. Reading through the papers this morning it seems that around 6 million texts have been exchanged overall yesterday which is a record. Both Cellplus and Emtel had made special arrangements to cater for the load of the festive season.

On moving out of the Caudan at around 1am in the morning there was a really huge queue and it took me at least 20 minutes to get out. Thank god there is Caudan if there wasn't we would have probably been enjoying the New Year at Champs de Mars.

Anyways just would like to wish you all a very happy and prosperous new Year 2007.

A day before the last of 2006

Its rare but tomorrow am not just celebrating the New Year I will also be celebrating Bakr-eid or Eid_ul-Adha.I won't be describing what New Year nor Eid_ul-Adha are am pretty sure you are all well educated readers :) and there are a lot of people that gonna blog about it.

This morning the Port-Louis bazaar was sizzling with goodies you could see that people were busy buying groceries for New Year parties , I guess this is one occasion where people of all faith and origin celebrate at a go. You could see that a swarm of buyers were going through the stalls much more than usual , much more than on Xmas even.

I was a bit disappointed that I didn't win the lottery though. The results had been out since yesterday but I only got the chance to check them out this morning.. ok maybe am not so disappointed I just hope someone in need would win the rs10 million and maybe bring some light in the lives of the people around him/her ...yes happy thoughts its the new year after all. An alouda was just what got me over my earlier disappointment...mmm would love to have one right now.

After the bazaar I had an absolutely great and memorable afternoon at the caudan . Went to see the new James Bond , Casino Royale . However I must say I think Pierce Brosnan does a better job than the new guy , Daniel Craig. The guy looked a bit old ...the Bond should be young come on but the thing that caught my eye the most during the flick was the Aston Martin ,just too good.



On going out from the cinema I noticed that I had lost my caudan parking ticket so I had to pay rs 200 fine and the guard at the exit took my Id and gave me a receipt for the fine. He told me that if I ever find the parking ticket I could give it back to them and the would return me back on the rs 200.



Thats it from me just can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store. :)

The 2006 most searched words on Google

Here is the top 10 most searched words on Google:

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Google being my favorite search engine I use it many times during the course of the day and honestly I never used any of the mentioned words in my search.

In fact I never heard many of the words used like for example bebo ,which is a social network site ,let alone of rebelde which I learnt from wikipedia was a Mexican telenova nor of mininova which is a bit torrent site.

Its surprising to see what other people are looking for.

Connection problem ends 2006

According to a communique by Mauritius Telecom due to an earthquake in asia , some important fiber optic cables have been damaged.

This has caused serious connectivity problems with asian servers along with congestion issues with Europe and America.

I fell the latency here on my MY.T connection its really annoying really to end the year with such a bad internet connection.

99.9% Xmas Spirit

Xmas is tomorrow and where others are having a cold and white Xmas we are having a hot and wet one.

I was at the bazaar in Port-Louis earlier, man it was crowded , people were in a special frenzy to get all their vegetables , meat and fish for the XMAS dinner and parties. One guy almost stumbled over me , he was carrying a bag of potatoes on his head ....that was scary :S.

Another thing I noticed were that lottery tickets were selling like pancakes needless to say that I bought Rs 200 worth of them, after all the grand prize is Rs10 Million ...but then i did win the lottery some weeks back so its ok if i don't win the Rs 10 Million ;) . Then had a cold glass of our national Alouda with Cream on top of it ... mmm delicious.

Its now time for me to wish you all a very happy , safe and festive Xmas . Remember do not drive and drink , I need you to read my blog!

My Xmas present for you people , a video of a stupid kid jumping off a balcony on top of Xmas tree :

Movies in 2007

This is the official list of films I will be watching in 2007:

1. Code Name: The Cleaner : Cedric the Entertainer, Lucy Liu, Elizabeth Hurley



2. Shrek 3



3. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End : Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom, Keira Knightley



4. The Simpsons Movie



5. The Invisible:Justin Chatwin, Marcia Gay Harden




6. Resident Evil: Extinction:Milla Jovovich, Oded Fehr



7. Mr. Bean's Holiday : Rowan Atkinson



8. Alien vs. Predator: Survival of the Fittest

9. Beowulf:Robert Zemeckis (director), Greg Ellis, Brendan Gleeson, Crispin Glover, Anthony Hopkins, Angelina Jolie, John Malkovich, Sebastian Roché, Ray Winstone, Robin Wright Penn



10. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix



11. Transformers



12. Ocean's Thirteen: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon



13. Ghost Rider: Nicolas Cage, Eva Mendes



14. Spider-Man 3:Sam Raimi (director), Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard

USB Missile Launcher

Disappointed by the performance of your co-worker or just want to get their attention when they are listening to music with their headphones on ... well here is the solution the USB powered missile launch .

This makes also a pretty cool gift for XMAS... so dont hesistate to buy half a dozen for me :P.

By the way , getting hit my USB missile rarely causes death and nuclear contamination ..just in case you wanted to know




Jack getting hit by 3 missiles .. man this guy is better than Bruce Willis in Unbreakable

Wii entry

As far as I can recall game pads haven't evolved a lot over the past 2 decades. The new generation of game pads are now equipped with movement detection mechanisms. The Wiimote is its name and its the new baby from Nitendo.

Over the past weeks I have been seeing really cool adverts on cable about the gaming possibilities with the Wiimote and its console the Wii , absolutely fantastic. Its like a breath of fresh air in the game world. Along with the fact that its your whole arm which needs to be in movement to play and not just your fingers is absolutely great , the more you spend time on your console , the more you exercise :D. Who needs to sweat in the gym when you can sweat in front of your TV set?

Now I just can't wait to get my hands on of them consoles ..even more than the PS 3 actually :D.

The binding power of the Jewels

Behold magnetic jewelery to make your mom , wife , girl friend and sisters go crazy this Christmas.

Coding at home

The problem with working at home is that you are detached from your office tools and utilities. This inaccessibility is a major problem at times for example am so used to RAD 6.0 for development where almost every configuration is made via wizards that having to configure a web-app or webservice by hand or by writing a script makes me really lazy :P.

Finding the right opensource tools and being able to integrate it with your development environment is always a major headache. Thats the biggest problem with open source , you might get it free but as far as being able to get it working in your development environment you have to do the little tweaks and configurations yourself.

Its at this crucial moment that you find out that there is a lack of documentation for your new downloaded open source gizmo or that it actually runs on a newever version of JDK than you are using or it requires half a dozen of other stuffs to be installed before you can actually start doing anything with it.

I just can't thank the guys at Eclipse.org for making our lives ever so easy with the version 3.2+ onwards of my favorite IDE.Creating webservices and J2EE applications is really such a breeze with Eclipse Callisto. There are dozens of plugins which you can add on top of it to make your coding experience really worth while. I tend to think of coding with with Eclipse 3.2 as a really pleasurable moment these days just like racing my car at night :P.

As far as servers are concerned I really can not afford to buy a Weblogic or WebSphere server although in the latter case there is the Geronimo project . I think the server I use most at home is Apache Tomcat , can't find anything easier to install and manage than good old tomcat. The advantage with kitty is that there are hundreds of documentation sites for it , this can be pretty handy if you want to diagnose whats wrong with your server at times.

Building the codes is another story everyone has his own idea about how to make this happen. Some prefer using Ant which is right now on version 1.7 others prefer using Maven 1 or 2. This really doesn't matter if you are at home working alone .. as long as your codes get compiled and archived properly , you can use whatever makes you happy. Although I do definitively prefer Maven 2 because of the strong jar versioning emphasis , reusability and modularity of the build tool.

Frameworks allow you to develop faster however it doesn't mean that your code will perform better ..so be careful about thinking that everything new is good.. try to see how they do in terms of development and what added value they bring to performance. My favorite framework of the moment is spring . Don't know how long this framework will survive in the framework jungle but right now its the best.

But then before you do implement any piece of code there should be some kind of design work in terms of class diagrams and the layout of the architecture of your codes. Dia seems to be a neat alternative to Visio but I haven't been able to use it a lot , what I have been using on the other hand for some not so complicated diagrams is Gliffy.com. Since I blogged an entry on the Gliffy service many of my friends have actually started using it and are happy with it.

Do also check out Osalt.com which provides a nice directory of open source alternatives to commercial products.

Bittorent goes HD

High definition phenomenon is not just for your TV sets now enter the HD quality films that can be downloaded using the Azureus bittorent client.



The site offering these superior quality videos is called Zudeo. There are some films , trailers , music videos and home made vids which are already available for free to download... there is even The Simpons movie trailer.

However HD also means a chunkier file so do expect like 100MB+ for a 7 min flick :P.

The chicken or the egg

This must have been the silliest question which has troubled so many ingenious minds all through these centuries which came first boiled eggs or kentucky fried chicken ?.. the egg or the chicken ?

So I made a search on wikipedia where the problem is extensively documented. How some people get such a kick from writing these kinds of stuff is even a bigger mystery for me :D.


Here is an extract ,

Since both the chicken and the egg create the other in certain circumstances (a chicken emerges from an egg; an egg is laid by a chicken) it is ambiguous which originally gave rise to the other. Purely logical attempts to resolve the dilemma result in an infinite regress, since an egg was caused by a chicken, which was caused by an egg, etc. Since every chicken originates from its egg, it seems obvious the egg came first.

My personal speculation is that Santa Claus came first , however this theory is overruled by many academics.

Here is another site which deals with the very exciting mystery.However be prepared for some incomprehensible explanation about the evolution of our common chickens.

Insaniquarium

Insaniquarium is an insanely addictive game where you need to breed fishes in an aquarium and in return they give you money with which you can buy more food and more fishes.



Its simple but fun to play...but don't expect graphics a la Prince of Persia :P though.

Flamboyant season

My mood has been really good since the past week , actually it has been absolutely great. This might explain why I caught interest in the flamboyant , a tree with bright red flowers.



This tree flowers only in December and lasts until end of December-start of January. Thats why it is associated a lot with the new year in Mauritius. We do not have snow here but hey..we got the flamboyant :).



I couldn't help taking some pictures of these trees as I went to the seaside on Sunday.

The battle of the ISPs

Nomad has been long targeting the niche of low budget households and students that cannot afford to get themselves a broadband package from Mauritius Telecom. However it was recently announced that MT would be lowering its price from rs900+ something to rs 700 .

Given the fact that MT offers a definitively better connection than Nomad which relies on WIMAX wireless technology , this has become a threat for Nomad's business. I even heard on the radio that Nomad was contacting authorities to prevent MT from reducing the price on MY.T's packages as this could mean major losses for this company.

Many people have been arguing with me about the fact that MT's packages were so expensive .. i think now they should realise that even when the price does go down some other company just causes a freeze down and we are all just stuck with the same pricing.

Dual screen phones

Be prepared for some futuristic designs for mobile phones ...presenting the dual screen mobile.



Apparently this is being patented by an asian firm but might just been seen in the year(s) to come.

Am waiting for the plasma phone , by the way things are going this shouldn't take very long.

SketchUp video

A few months ago I blogged about google SketchUp the (free) tool that allows you to create your 3-D buildings in no time .

Here is a movie that shows you just how powerful the tool is:

Amazing Software From Google Team - video powered by Metacafe

Xmas Decorations

Ho ho ho ..the XMAS Spirit is spreading across the world...December is here and as everyone knows this is the month where we party the most....which is a good thing after a year of hard work . By the way father xmas if you read this blog .. its been 15 years since you gave me anything .

Anyways (meh) we have started decorating our TNT office (the best company in the world) , with some decorations. Because of security reasons I will show only the entrance though. Yes you can consider the office as a mauritian version of Area-51.





Father XMas ...(yes am coming back to the old bugger..oops ..forget i said that Papa Noel) , you will find my socks in my cupboard , there are 50 of them. There is also my shoes and a shoe polish and brush next to them ...if you have some spare time ..well you know what to do ....just kidding there father xmas no need to get angry.

Okie so just in case you forgot where I live (??!!!@&%£$), am leaving my GPS coordinates with yah -60.1234222,69.91231232 .Now you don't have any reasons to miss me for the 16th time.

However if you reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaally need to give presents to more needy ppl ..(pfft kids they always get what they want)...well you can just send me a blog comment :) .

The Long horse

This is one interesting article about the existence of a horse that looked like a teckel in width and had such a long torso that it could carry 4 people at the same time.




However this breed of horses got extinct due to the fact that it had a small lifespan. Some tend to believe that this is a hoax whilst others think that it might just be true but still it is a nice story :).

Dhoom 2 Review

Went to watch Dhoom 2 today , I never watched Dhoom before so I didnt really know what to expect except for the fact that Abhishek Bachan is a cop that needs to nail down thieves like Hritik Roshan . Abhiskek is assisted by Udhay Chopra. Its strange all 3 have families strongly linked with the Bollywood film industry.



Did i mention that there is Bipasha Basu and Aishwarya Rai in the flick? ....by the way i think Bipasha is way better than Aishwarya!



This motion picture is family oriented although there are loads of muscles and very little clothes, so you can take your grandma and kids safely to watch it. The film shown at Star , Caudan , is subtitled so if you don't understand Hindi , you can still enjoy it ...at times the subtitles were really helpful to understand what Udhay was talking about.

Some scenes were really nicely made and scripted like the one where Hritik needs to steal a diamond in a museum which is heavily protected. But then there are loads of crappy scenes especially those pictured on Aishwarya ....her acting is really awful... even worse is Udhay in a funny role .. although i must admit he did made me laugh a few times with his silly lines.

This is an action movie and one of the best of 2006 with spectacular stunts executed mostly by Hrithik Roshan which did a marvelous performance as usual. Lots of fighting in sea , on land , on sand, in the air , ..everywhere.

The songs are one of the key points of this movie they rock really hard I can tell you that , the ones I like most are , Touch Me , Crazy Kiya Reh , My name is Ali.



I would certainly recommend this movie to anyone wishing to watch a light and entertaining film.

The million dollar homepage

Some dude on the web go an interesting idea for selling advertisement space, the milliondollarhomepage.com , he took one page and sold each pixel of the page for $1 now he's idea worked so well that he now is a multi millionaire.. did I mention that his advertisement page is sold out ?

World Aids Day

Today 1st December is World's Aids Day. Many people through out the world are still suffering from this evil virus which has shattered many families and killed thousands of innocent children. As much as 5,500 people die on a daily basis in Africa from AIDS.

What's annoying is that simple gestures could have saved so many lives . Use condoms when having sex, if you are a drug addict don't share your needles (don't be an addict in the first place!)..these are stuffs that we have been taught for so long and still so many people don't care to take their precautions thinking that AIDS happens to others and not to them.

For those that want to help people affected by this virus please do not hesitate to donate and help progress research to find a cure against HIV AIDS.

Meanwhile the (RED) campaign under the blessings of U2 singer Bono is selling a number of products for the benefit of helping those suffering from this disease.

MY.T enduring its first network problems

The MY.T connection is one of the best I have seen so far on the Mauritian market , however yesterday a lot of users experienced a sudden unavailability of Internet connection .

I personally thought that my LiveBox had stopped working since every time there is a powercut the red bulb next to the '@' symbol starts blinking rapidly..which means no Internet connection.Occasionally you hear a clicking-like sound which means its unable to connect.

Then I called 8585 which is the My.T hotline and discovered that the actual problem resided on the MY.T network itself not on my LiveBox ...fiouff.. and was told that the problem would be solved in the coming hours.

Eventually I got fed up waiting and discovered only in the morning that the network issue had been fixed. A brief has been communicated on servihoo about it.

Lets just hope this does not happen on a regular basis.

A free alternative to MS Visio

Visio is a brilliant tool , frankly I love using it , however it costs money and unfortunately I don't have the bucks to install it on all my pcs. I have been looking for a long time for a good alternative to draw up my network , UML , Architecture and other diagrams until I stumbled upon gliffy this afternoon.

Gliffy.com is a flash based website that allows you to draw up your diagrams free on the web . The interface is similar to that of Visio and other similar desktop equivalents. You simply drag and drop your shapes on the canvas to start your diagram.

Current supported drawings are Flow Chart , UML ,Network , User Interface , Floor Plan.You can register free and all your diagrams are stored online. This is really one of the most useful sites I've seen this year.

Here below is a floor plan I made of my room .

JBuilder 2007 is out

The long awaited JBuilder 2007 has been released and unfortunately it is not yet available for download in the Borland JBuilder Downloads section.

Still you can always try out Foundation version of JBuilder 2005 which is absolutely free however it is a scrapped down version of the commercial IDE.



Before Eclipse ,JBuilder used to be the King of IDE's for Java Development but nowadays JBuilder has slowly slipped into a dark Era of unpopularity maybe due to its commercial nature and lack of plugins "a la Eclipse".Maybe this is why this time the core of JBuilder has been written upon the Eclipse platform :D.

Reviewing ReviewMe

The following is a paid review

The idea is simple and brilliant ReviewMe.com is a site where you can actually purchase a review of your blog , product or service.



Signed up to the ReviewMe.com site is a number of writers may they be expert in Art , Culture , Technology or literature who offer their reviewing expertise.

Now a company or individual would hire these writers to write something about the service that they are offering and the writers get half the sum of money depending on their popularity on the web and the other half is collected by ReviewMe.com .

Its an easy way to make some cash if you are a fellow blogger who likes reviewing stuffs and expressing your opinions.

I have personally signed up and the review that you are reading right now could eventually bring me $20 at the end of the month :D...isn't that great $20 I could buy myself a mega-dinner at pizza hut ;) .



The first thing that struck me when I came across ReviewMe.com was the fact that the interface was so simple and easy to understand. Thats the way that most sites should look like , the more complex the information being provided the simpler the interface should be.

If you are a blogger and you accept to take up a review , you are provided with a deadline for example for this review am expected to complete it in 48 hours. So not only is it bringing some money but also its a bit like a game where you have a time limit ..else no mega-dinner at pizza hut :P.

For any blogger its a good experience in the sense that it tries to bring more maturity and volume to articles.

On the other hand for the advertiser its definitively more interesting to have people giving their opinions on the service they are trying to sell than putting pointless banners and pop ups on websites that people totally ignore . Furthermore with browsers like Firefox that have plugins that can detect adverts and completely hide it from the surfer , it becomes more and more useless to pay huge amounts of money on such means of marketing.

I think now the best that could happen to ReviewMe.com is that advertisers discuss this powerful tool that can help them become famous or notorious on the web in no time :P.

Snap.com the new web 2.0 search engine

The new generation Web 2.0 search engines doesn't just provide you with accurate results and provide alternatives if they detect spelling mistakes nor do they just auto-complete your queries itself ...actually they even allow you to preview the results directly on your search page.



If you don't understand what am talking about just check out Snap.com to give a new dimension to your surfing experience.

However the fact that only 4-5 results can be viewed at a time is a bit annoying , this means a lot of time spent with the next page button to eventually find what your looking for. Still its a really good tool.

By way do you know the meaning of the Web 2.0 ?... well neither did I until I did a little search on the net about it . Apparently the word was coined by O'Reilly , it seemed that O'Reilly and his buddies wanted a new word that would depict sites such as MySpace , YouTube , Flickr that allowed the surfer to participate and build a network of users . The new "Web" would allow the deployment of web applications which normally would replace desktop applications in the coming years ..or months :p .

If you want more information on Web 2.0 do check out the Wikipedia page dedicated to it.

The joy of reading a free book thanks to Don

Donald Crowdis is considered as one of the oldest bloggers on blogosphere , am really baffled at how he is still able to write such good, funny and intelligent articles.

The guy even has a wikipedia entry and from what am reading he is still having a very active life at the age of 92.



Well thanks to one of the entries of Donald Crowdis I was able to find this nice little link to the University of Adelaide which allows you to search through their online library which spreads across various categories such as Literature, Philosophy, Science, and History.

Now coming back to Donald he wrote an very interesting and puzzling entry about cannibalism which is mentioned on BoingBoing.net where I initially discovered Don's blog...I leave you to find out about it .

Garfield 2 the return of the King

On saturday we went to Star at Caudan to watch one of the most memorable films in the whole wide world GARFIELD 2.

There was like 3 of us and about 30 kids and their parents ... so we did look a bit weird there.The guy who sold the ticket had even asked us if we had any kids accompanying us :).


But as soon as the animated garfield lit up on the screen everyone young and old started to laugh their heads off. Its a really nice movie specially if you like cats and cats ...and cats.

In this new movie Garfield discovers a look-alike kitty which lives in a cool castle in the UK . Cast along-side Garfield is his friend Oddy ..a really wonderfully stupid doggy...and there is also his master and his master's girl friend.

You dont have anything to do this weekend? .. well Garfield's a must see !

The Sucks No Limit T-Shirt

Yashvin has interesting pics of his Nomad Suck No Limit T-Shirt on his blog. It was so funny that I couldn't help not writing about it .. really good sense of humour.



Good thing the nomad people had a sense of humour too :D !!

Infotech 2006 updates

Yesterday we went to the 2006 edition of infotech which for the first time was held at Swami Vivekananda centre at Pailles. I had taken a few photos there but it seems its high time i get rid of my phone cause I was unable to download them to my pc :(.

This years infotech had less stalls namely those of smaller companies , my assumption would be because of the fact that the prices are much higher for stalls at Swami VVivekananda. The good thing is that the entrance fee is still free.

We were greeted by a BMW at the HM Rawat stall , i think most people went to the stall because of the car . As for the price of the phones these go as follows the 2 centres of attraction were as usual the now famous N93 which is being sold around Rs 31,000 (VAT included) and the E70 which revolved around Rs 26,000 . The E70 is mostly a business phone which can open up into a Keyboard .


Then there we went to the i-mate stall which had some nice smartphones , I gave my email address to one of the representatives to send me the pricings of the handhelds but he has up to now not sent anything.

The Emtel stall was amongst one of the most impressive stalls but they had bet more about attracting customers with fewly clothed top model type of girls and big wide screens instead of actually portraiting what they wanted to sell. So eventually people were like looking at the stall from a distance without actually knowing why they should actually go inside .

There were also tons of laptops being sold went to see one Dell Inspiron with Core Duo processor priced at Rs 85,000 and the lady there told me that that was actually a promotional price the real price would be Rs 100,000 . Who said that laptops were getting more affordable?


Courts however is proposing a couple of Acer laptops which are quiet nice and fall around the Rs 45,000+ VAT range but with only 512Mb on most models . They even had the famous Acer Ferrari Laptop with 2GB RAM , however although this particular beast sported a nice design the fact that its DVD drive was external was not very appealing.

Do note that Accenture , Ceridian and Currimjee stalls are open to provide information to prospective candidates wishing to join these companies.

My opinion is that the Infotech is a good show but I would expect many people to be actually buying anythere there because of the price of the products being sold.

Pimp my ride by Borat

Another clip from our friend Borat found on youtube.com , here borat pimps your ride a la MTV style:

Watch a movie inside of a concrete block

In the future we will be able to watch our movies and tv on our wall itself ...did i forgot to say.. without a projector?

A company has recently developed a special type of concrete with optical fibers embedded into it.

The potential of such a technology is huge , imagine your office wall turning into your pc monitor and your concrete bus stand into a advert displayer.

Have a look for yourself at the video :

Make art from..red bull cans

Red bull has long been my key energy generator whenever i had to work or party all nite .. but never thought that the best selling taurine drink of the century could also be used for art !!



Checkout the site www.redbullartofthecan.com , please note that the site is in flash if you see a blank white page its normal ..its loading :P

Blackberry to be launched in Mauritius

Cellplus has announced that it will soon launch the cool business smartphone blackberry in Mauritius which will target mostly business people.

Blackberrys have a proven track record of being one of the most useful handsets on the market currently to keep track of your office mails and contacts.

Two models will be proposed the BlackBerry® 7130g and the BlackBerry® 8700g .

However one thing that does lack from the numerous possibilities offered by the phones are that you can't actually take any picture as they are not equipped with cameras.

Prince Of Persia

Spent the whole morning lazing around my pc playing Prince of Persia : Sands of times until i got stuck not even after completing like 2% of the game ...yeah yeah yeah i admit it am a bad player.

So i did what any impatient gamer would do , i decided to get the damn walkthrough and that didnt help much either ..

So i installed another game ..Prince of Persia : The Two Thrones ..which by the way rocks ..awesome gameplay.



Now my eyes are all blurry ..need some rest :P.

And some people are enjoying themselves at the seaside!

Unusual Mail Opener

What do i hear ??? .. you want a low tech solution to open your mails ... you lazy folks get yourself a bunny:

Tera mera pyaar on Utube

This is one nice video from the album Tera mera pyaar don't know how it ended up on youtube but enjoy :

yourminis.com

One more flash powered gift from the guys from goowymedia ,who created Goowy Mail , yourminis.com allows you to neatly organise all your widgets or minis together.

In the end you get your own dazzling personal dashboard from where you can monitor flickr , youtube , your email accounts , play games , read dilbert comics and there is even a notepad and todos widget... Dont you want to sit down and cry with joy?

The email accounts supported are gmail , goowy mail , however for Yahoo and Hotmail you need to have a premium or plus account . hmmm wished i could check my hotmail and yahoo from there too ... too bad dont have any dough to upgrade :( .



You can add tabs to yourminis account and organize your widget tab wise or absolutely any you want. The widgets themselves are draggable and re-sizeable whilst the tabs can be skinned using flickr photos .. coool. huh?



One more neat feature is the ability to publish any of the tabs and thus offering friends and other people the ability to view it . Mine is here http://www.yourminis.com/javed .

Registration is free so go get yourminis :P !

Sukhoi 27 Cobra fighter planes

We have gone very far away from top gun style airplanes :P.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

The Borat movie is definitively a must see , although am sure we not gonna get that on cinema in Mauritius .



Will have to get the DVD as soon as its out its really too hilarious.

Find below the Borat interview :P:



By the way did you know that Borat had a fan , from Kazahstan ?

Eid Mubarak and my best wishes

Just came back from Eid prayer , i'd like to wish you all Eid Mubarak. Roza 2006 is now over the fasting has ended.

Today many muslim households will be cooking the traditional biryani. My mom is a known expert for that but however I never managed to understand when and how to place the ingredients :P .

What I do know is that you need to fry your onions (cut in thin rings) and your potatoes (just peeled , not need to cut it any futher) beforehand.

Then you need to place your meat, chicken , fish or whatever else you want to add to your biryani at the bottom of your cooking vessel. Marinate the whole with "ti anis" and herbs and ...(thats where i forget what to add) ... and blablahblah... everyone has his own version for the marination.

On a seperate fire boil your basmati rice , get rid of the water ...without burning yourself..thats important.

Place the boiled rice on top of your marination , cover and seal . Let to cook on a medium fire.

OOooh , you need to open up the vessel again cause i forgot to tell you that you need to add jaffran for yellow colouring ...hhehehhe... sorry about that.

Now your ready for a traditional biryani meal which you eat for lunch and dinner .. in my case its the next day too. Whats good with the biryani is that the longer you keep it , strangely the better it tastes .. however dont try eating a 4 days old biryani.... not recommended.

Dove Evolution - Raise your self esteem

This youttube video called Dove Evolution speaks for itself.



Thats the way i like campaigns to be :) .

Wish u a happy Divali

Happy divali to all of ya .. please make sure i get my cakes on monday though ..even though i will be fasting :P

CHEERS!!!!!!!

Alien loves Predator

More comic strips at AlienLovesPredator.com .

Now officially online 24hrs a day

I just got My.T installed at home and i must admit that it simply rocks ... the joys of being online 24 hours a day for only a little over a thousand rupees per month.......wicked!!!!!!!!!!!

Hurray!

My room now look absolutely hyped up with a cool powered up PC connected to ADSL and my TV connected to the digital tuner box.

I can hardly hide my joyyy ...blastingly goooooooooooooooooood!