The Coorgh Trip

I had a wonderful week end at Coorgh with Shanky, Shriram, Sab, Prem and RK. Me and Shriram had come to banglore the previous night and stayed at Shanky’s place. The next day morning at around 5.30, we were all geared up to begin our journey.  We had hired a Chevrolet for our trip and the first thing that we were happy about was that the driver  knew tamil and he was very  gregarious. He was pretty much our age and looked like a Kanada hero.

Mc Donald’s :

The first place we stopped en route to Coorgh was at this petrol bunk which incidentally had a Mc Donalds in its premises. And it had been long time since any of us went to Mc D, so we had our early breakfast at around 7 here at Mc D.

Tibet Camp :

This place was like a mini Tibet in India. This was the first place en route our journey to Coorgh. The place was a Buddhist monastery. It was calm except for all the noise that we made. The place was serene with Buddhist monks glorifying their traditions. I particularly was amazed at the way they had decorated the deity. But one surprising thing that I noticed was that, they served Mirinda and Pepsi as holy water!!!. There were also piles of lays and maaza packets stacked in front of the altar, that we were curious as to when they would be distributed. We spent about forty minutes at this place and started clicking pictures. The Bird Sanctuary : We actually didn’t cover this because we thought we were getting late and were more interested in watching the other “birds” up hill .

The Water Rafting :

This was our next stop after the Buddhist monastery. We got to see our first “birds” and they were awesome . This place is meant for adventurous rafting, but since the water stream wasn’t great, they were only offering a mild still water rafting(though actually the water was flowing slowly). Costs about 100 per head. We soon got ourselves prepared for rafting. Oars on hands and life jackets on, we were all set for a forty five minute rafting. Should have been around a kilometer. The guide who came with us was equally interested in experimenting with different stunts on rafting. We took all possible routes and drove under close branches that were hanging down from the banks. Not to forget about the debate that me, rk and shanky got into before starting the ride ( censored but the result was evident ).

Coorgh:

The next stop was at Coorgh. It was already 12 in the afternoon and we resumed our journey to Coorgh. It was about half an hour travel from the rafting spot. And this time, wild bamboos on either side of the road greeted us with memories that would stay etched evergreen. All through the time, we had a really nice time teasing either sab or shanky. Occasionally I got entangled in the course of fun-making but managed to remain impalpable. We reached Coorgh at about 2 in the afternoon. We had booked a room at Rajdarshan. Cost us 1600+tax for a 4 member room which six of us shared. We spent about ten fifteen minutes refreshing in the room. The room was commodious. It even had a bathtub. We watched TV for a while and settled down for lunch at a local hotel. Our bird watching continued and we were now like syncing with a flock.

Abbey Falls :

I remember coming to this place when I was in my eighth standard. It was a steep walk down from the entrance to the main falls. Unfortunately, we were only allowed to watch the water falls from a distance, which shattered our hopes of wetting our feet. Next we proceeded to the view point. There was in fact no actual view point. We even saw a nice location for viewing the crevices that we named it a “new view point”. And then we were off to Rajas Seat.

Raja’s Seat :

This was supposed to be a small park with musical fountain, but turned out to be a trekking for us. With bird watching at the peaks, we first filled our quench for snacks with few stops at the bhel-puri shops and then went on inside the park. But then, we saw quite a few people trekking down the slope from the park. This wasn’t supposed to be a trek, but it sort of turned out to be a short one. We went up and down the hilly slopes and clicked lots of pictures. Finally we returned to the park after about one and half hours of mild trekking and were on time for the musical fountain. Once this got over, we were off to some shopping and finally dinner, back at the restaurant. Had a sumptuous dinner and returned back to room. (In between convo with nami on phone to be discussed later in a diff blog post ). Finally we were back in room, transferred the picks to comp and took few more pics and started watching X-men movie. In all it was a nice enjoyable day 1 .

Day 2 was more of travelling. At Coorgh there aren’t much places to visit for a 2-day trip. The only place left for us was “Thala Cauvery”. So we were headed there the next day morning at around 7  in the morning. We had a nice breakfast in the Udupi hotel ( Not to forget shriram telling us that there is a Sangeetas in Coorgh also :P )

Thala Cauveri :

This according to myths is the origin of the river Cauvery. I had been to this place in my childhood. The journey to this place from Coorgh was awesome. It was totally misty and it was raining intermittently.  Finally when we reached the place, the visibility was almost like 10 feet, beyond which u can see no more. Some of my friends had built up a mental picture of this place as some cave from which cauvery would be emanating with a sprout. I had warned them about this place being not to what they had in mind. And it so happened that there was a big pond sort of thing in which, there was a small marked spot, meant for worship. This they called was where cauvery originated. But we noticed that the water kept coming out at a good rate by looking at the water coming out constantly from the pond. But this place was really worth visiting for two things. One the climate,being the highest altitude  in the vicinity and second the place is well maintained as u can evidently see from the pictures.

After this, we pretty much had nothing left to visit at Coorgh and started our journey downhill. We planned to touch upon Mysore on our way back, but we had to reach Bangalore early enough to visit a friend’s house and catch the train back to Chennai at 10.45 pm. So we decided to just visit the palace and return as soon as possible from Mysore. And this was when we really got bored listening to the Hindi songs the driver had. So we got down, brought an empty CD and burnt it with AR R’s Tamil songs ( yes we carried not one but three laptops )

Mysore Palace :

Due to time constraints, we didn’t have time to go inside the palace. We roamed around in the outskirts of palace and clicked pictures. Birds were there aplenty here too . Stayed here for about half an hour and started our journey back to Bangalore.

Mc Donald’s Revisited :

Now this was totally because we ran out of charge in our laptops and had to transfer pics from cam to laptops. So we planned to charge our laptops in Mc D and also have a something to eat before reaching Bangalore.  We finally reached Bangalore at around 7 in the evening. Dropped off Shanky, Sab and Prem in a local bus stop and we headed on to Archana’s home. She had invited us for dinner. Had a nice time at her place and at around 9.30, Shriram, Me and RK got into an auto and left for the railway station.

In all it was an awesome time. We had been planning such trips for a long time and each and every time, some thing or the other would come up and we would have to call it off. This time it went on well except that, Bur couldn’t make it. We all missed him in the trip.

Crazy Dreams…

I dont remember my dreams. Never could I recollect what I had dreamt about  in the last night. A few exceptions are this and the one that woke me up this morning. They would rather come under the category of nightmares.  For the past few days, I have been trying really hard to read this big book (Barrons) of hundreds of words that even makes a month a small time for an exam. I dont reckon preparing for any exam like this in a very long long time.

So here goes the dream and I was so terrified that I totally remember the details. It was a sandy beach. In fact lots of sand … and then there were couple of  my friends and we were all happily playing and chit chatting. And suddenly this guy starts talking about GRE and  he gave me the following shocking news

1. GRE from now on is for a score of 2200

2. No math in GRE and its only  the verbal section completely

3. And a new edition of barrons with 103 word lists is newly released .

And then he went on to tell me that some guy wrote it in a jiffy and got some 2188 .. I have no idea how I remember so much from a dream ..  I just got up with a shock, messaged two ppl who were giving GRE today and then slept  back.  May be all these happened because I was trying to do 4 word lists yesterday  to compensate for my slow pace of current preps.

In all, I just wanna be done with it and move on to other things. I have been battered since the day, I had planned to give GRE. First it was with getting a passport which almost took me 2  visits to chennai passport office and finally one visit to trichy pass port office and now I get awkward dreams of the examination. On one side, I am having an awesome summer, on the other side, I am really getting abused by these GRE preps. The only thing that I am sharpening in this process is the pencil that I use to keep track of the words

The two ways of life !!

I believe there are two ways to live the life. Rather, I should say, I have convinced myself that there are only two ways to live a life. One way is to follow the wise advices of people, like your parents, your well-wishers who have seen it through in their life. The other way is to not listen to them, make mistakes of your own, and then realise the importance of those words that were rendered at you earlier in your life to which u never bothered to heed.

I believe eventually everybody gets to learn this. That, whatever you choose, if u are yearning for a success, you need to follow those golden words sometime or other. The interesting part is when you choose the second option in your life, you are anyway gonna end up joining the roads of people who have chosen the first path. But what makes you different and advantageous is that, you have learned it all by yourself and convinced yourself of the things that you have become.

I believe, I chose the second option a couple of years ago, and slowly planning to join the road I would have been into if I had not made the choice. So coincidental that I was recently reminded of this

“You dont change when you are shown a better option. You only change when you dont have any other option.”

But I have learnt a lot. Things that can’t be expressed through words and can only be understood. And then the vicious circle continues. You may then understand why you were being advised on the first place and how much people had cared about you.

PS : You know you are a topcoder when you get so philosophical after losing your rating !!! ( )

Jaunty Jackalope Review

Ever since jaunty released , I had cleared made up my mind not to try it out. I thought 6 months was too little time to spend with intrepid . I was completely configured and running smoothly on intrepid that I never felt the need for upgrading to the next version though I heard about the new notification system or the awesome boot up time . But yesterday night , I was crazy and wanted to do something and installed jaunty . So this is sort of my review. Now what made me so crazy was that , I had failed in all my attempts to install amarok 2.1 in intrepid . It just wouldn’t install . All it did was install amarok 2.0.1 and i downloaded the source of 2.1 and compiled and tried to install. Still failure . So I was determined to do something successful and was convincing myself about the upgrade . So then came the confusion of whether to go for kubuntu or ubuntu . Because some of the kubuntu plasma screen shots were just awesome and inviting . I some how settled with ubuntu and gnome .

At first , the Live CD itself was fast . I couldnt see any lag and I tried to see if it had the latest drivers for my nvidia graphics card ( this sort of screwed the first boot after my installation ) . It downloaded the drivers succesfully and thinking it was a normal install , had asked me to restart . I chucked it and went along to install jaunty and the installation was also quick . Using Ext4 now . And then the first boot struck the panic .

Since I had downloaded the nvidia drivers in my live session to check if drivers do exist, it had downloaded it on to the RAM and marked it to be used on the next boot which happens to be my first boot after installing . But sadly the downloaded drivers are no more because it was temporarily on RAM and the Xorg crashed saying not able to find the nvidia driver modules.I recovered from that and then went on to configure the system ( first update in FB that I am into jaunty now ) . Then I went on to download the proper nvidia drivers this time on to my / and enabled it . Installed compiz , and transferred all the config files from intrepid that I had taken back up to jaunty  . All my themes and Icons , fonts , splash screens , GDM s from intrepid are now on jaunty . In about 2 hours , I was totally settled with Jaunty . This is what I really liked about Ubuntu when compared to Fedora . If I was doing the same process in Fedora , it would have taken me easily about a day or more . I got everything installed in Jaunty in a Jiffy from realplayer , texmaker , vlc , amarok , php5 , falsh players and stuff . Did all changes to bashrc , fstab , etc etc .

In general , I was really happy to have switched to Jaunty for the following

1. Awesome boot up time . It booted off in some 20-25 secs .
2. The system was a bit fast now .
3. Ext 4 is something new
4. The new notifications
5. The new usplash and GDM .
6. Was surprised to see the new Xorg server work fine without any of the so called reported probs .

I don’t think I had any probs apart from the initial nvidia screw up and one pidgin screw up . I had added a buddy pounce in my pidgin to shut down pidgin when this somebody@gmail.com comes online . And looks like the pounce was activated each time I tried starting pidgin and that “somebody” was online . Gave some segmentation fault because I was trying to kill pidgin from itself I guess .  Apart from all these jaunty looks new and exiting and yeah , I finally had amarok 2.1 in my jaunty and it was making good progress towards to a stable release with all features of amarok 1.4 . From now on , I guess all that is between upgrading from one ubuntu release to another is just 4 hours of work and a really fast internet connection

And I am mirroring the repos for jaunty from IIT M tomoro . So ppl who need it can get it from me .. or I ll put it up in coll when I am back
Any reviews or followups , leave it in comments please .