The cake show

Nilgiris as their traditional part had organized Cake Show Exhibition at St Joseph’s Indian High School. This was their 33rd Annual Cake Show. This exhibition is usually conducted during Christmas and New Year season. Interesting and distinguishing part of their Exhibition is the structure stands with merely sugar, without any assistance of any external reinforcement. It is said that the sugar used for this model will be melted and given away for charity purpose. Some of the models made at the exhibition are Santa Villa, The 5 sailor man ship, Christ the Redeemer, The Great wall of China, The Roman Colosseum, Flower Wagon, Sports Car, Robot, Taj Mahal, Kiddies Wheel, Jurassic Park, Windsor Castle, Cinderella Coach, Flower Arrangement, Peacock and Veena.

There was also International lifestyle exhibition on the other side of the Grounds organized by the National Consumer Fair. There were stalls of mouthwatering rich plum cakes, Marzipan and many other goodies from Nilgiris. Some consumer electronic products were also exhibited. Nilgiris record of organizing the exhibition is recorded in the Limca book of Records, but unfortunately did not made its entry in the Guinness Book of world records.
Here are some of the snaps:
http://picasaweb.google.com/chaitravenkatesh0/NilgirisCakeShow?authkey=_qGhbH9yVek&feat=directlink

Kanchipuram

Kanchipuram is The Best place for buying the silk sarees. About a month back I had been to this place. This was 3rd time we are going there. Kanchipuram is known for silk sarees and it also called saree palace. Kanchi sarees is named after its place Kanchipuram.
We left @ 5.30 in the morning and reached Kanchipuram @9.20. The shop there usually opens at 10. So we had to kill 40 minutes. Meanwhile we had breakfast, which suju had packed. It was 10.15 when we entered the shop; by then already two customers had entered. They were also buying sarees for the Marriage function. The shopkeepers are very quick and clever; they could make out us that we are buying sarees for the marriage function. May be the group we went there made him realize, but they are smart enough to guess for which occasion the customers are buying.
First we started selecting the sarees for sheela (bridegroom), and then we started selecting for ourselves. We got confused which one to buy by the amount of collection they had.
I had dark green color strictly in my mind to buy, and then I went on it. So totally we bought 18 sarees and the girl side bought abt14-16 sarees. At the end looked at the watch it was 3.30. You won't realize the time when u are inside. We paid the bill and existed from the place. sujju was insisting going for another shop, as she did not find the type of saree she had in her mind, so we went to other shop, luckily she found it there and she was happy. At about 4.30 we had our lunch in Sharvanna Hotel, suppose to be The Best Hotel in Kanchipuram. But nobody in my family liked the Hotel, as we didn't find roti's or chapati's there. I ended in drinking juice there to fill my empty stomach. We started leaving there by 5.45. Everyone was exhausted and way back everyone was sleeping.
Even Ramu uncle was also very tired; in turn he gave 3-4 sudden breaks at the humps.
Finally we reached home at 9.45 in the night.
There was totally 3 toll gates to reach Kanchipuram, where each of them is priced b/w 30-56 Rs. Overall, it was tiresome Day without proper food.

Comparative Statistics

The Tech Republic Team has the following Statistical Analytics.

Here are some interesting, believable, yet totally depressing stats from Carnegie Mellon University. This list was compiled by Maureen McCarty of The Washington Post.

* Women, on average, ask for 30 percent less money than males.
* Men are four times more likely to negotiate a first salary than women.
* Men are eight times more likely than women to negotiate their starting salary and benefits.
* Women ask for raises or promotions 85 percent less often than their male counterparts.
* In 2007, women who were full-time wage and salary workers earned 80 percent of their male counterpart’s salary.
* 20 percent of women (22 million people) say they never negotiate at all, even though they recognize negotiation as appropriate and even necessary.
* 2.5 times more women than men said they feel “a great deal of apprehension” about negotiation.
* When asked to pick metaphors for negotiations, men picked “winning a ball game match,” while women picked “going to the dentist.”

Go Desi

Now u can see every other thing going desi. Right from the kurkure to pizzas. The pizzas are now available in desi-style. The few varities are: Kolhapuri, Do Pyaza, Malai and Kalimirch. Hmmm sounds yummy.

STC India 10th Annual Conference

Hoping to attend STC India 10th Annual Conference in Pune, Maharashtra. It will be the largest gathering of Technical Communicators in India. It will be a good networking platform, wherein you get to meet various professionals from Technical Communication field under one roof. The event also exposes to the latest technologies, trends,tools and opinions in the technical communication field. I'm all excited to attend this for the first time.
see more about Conference http://stc-india.org/conferences/2008/index.htm

Laptop gone Deaf

Last to last night was a bit frustration night as my Laptop was deaf.
Late night sat in front of Laptop trying to listen to a podcast sent from a friend.
Accessing my Gmail clicked on the link which a friend had sent. The file was running but there was no sound output. I was Shocked at that point. Just before the previous day it was working fine. Hmmm what to do… at first I checked my volume control- it was set to high, I cross checked in the control panel-> sound and audio device->volume, audio and voice tab are grayed off . I did a restart to the machine, but nothing worked. Called a friend who had configured my system, he gave some task to perform on the system, did that, even then nothing worked. By then it was already too late for my sleep. Rubbing my eyes too and fro, yawning broadly, did some Google. With the various solutions on the web I tried one-by one. But the result was negative. I was really frustrated at that moment. By then I saw the watch it was half past one. I left everything there put a full stop for my search then shut down my system and went for sleep. Next day in the office the audio problem of the system was still fishing in my mind. Again clinched on the web search, saw a couple of them. A saw a post which gave me a thought that it might settle my problem, immediately copied that paragraph to the mail and sent it to my personal mail ID. After 6 went home freshened up myself, had snack and straight away went to open my laptop tried the solution which I had in my mailbox. Of about 5.-6 steps lead me the way. And laptop was back with the sound output. It is no more deaf now.

Here are the tasks which I performed to get back the sound output on my HP Compaq Presario C700:

1. Installed the audio driver
Conexant CX20549-12 High Definition Audio Driver
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36001-36500/sp36090.exe

2. When you install the driver it will give an error message [Media device not found]. Don’t get fooled by this. Now it’s your turn to take control of the system.

3. Open your “Device Manager”. Look for “High Definition Audio Device”. You will find a yellow mark beside it indicating that the devices is not working properly. Right click and choose to install driver. Don’t let installation wizard do any thing on its own.

4. Don’t let Windows to search for drivers. Choose advanced option of installing driver by choosing the location on your own.

5. Then choose “Audio, Video, Games Controller” and then don’t choose any driver from the list given by Windows. Click “Have disk”.

6. Now you need to look for a “swsetup” folder in your “C:” drive. This is the drive where HP drivers have been extracted automatically. Look for “sp36090″ [the number of the HP driver] folder in it. If you don’t find the folder in “swsetup” look for the folder in “C:” drive. You will find one “.inf” file in the folder [Don't go into the other folders within 'sp36090' folder]. This is the driver file for your audio device. Select it and proceed irrespective of any warning by Windows.

When I searched the web, I figured out that it was the problem caused by the automatic windows update. By chance I must have clicked on the icon which comes in the right hand side of the system tray.

well now I am enjoying listening to the podcast as usual.

Decrease in Size (Gmail)

Look what happened to my Gmail…

I was just replying to one of the email thread. I drafted the mail and changed the font size and color to match with the earlier mail. Fine, the mail was also successfully sent, but u know what did it happen, it changed my entire Gmail font size. A pic of that is here.
Don’t know how that happened. Right now trying to recover.