Went with my friend for his fitness test. It was a small hill opposite Chennai Airport. They had to climb up the hill within a certain time limit. If they did, they’re in. Or else, better luck next time. My friend Charan, being the energetic-enthu guy was one of the first to reach the top.

A few days later, I received a small list of people whom I was asked to call up and confirm their participation. I did. Soon we finalized the list of participants. It was a big group of 45 which was split up into two for convenience. I coordinated the Guindy pickup point where 3 cars and around 13 people were to come. I took my car and went to Guindy at 7.45PM, a few minutes earlier than what was specified to others. One by one people came, got introduced and got into one of the cars waiting there. Once everyone was in, we proceeded to meet the others at Koyambedu. After signing the disclaimer form and paying the trek expenses, we started out trip.

There was a lead car. Followed by the rest of us and a sweep car at the end. Among all those numerous heavy vehicles in the road, we soon lost sight of the other cars. Assuming that the others are already ahead, I hit the accelerator very hard. Within no time our car reached the toll gate. We then got a call from one of the organizers telling that they had actually stopped much ahead of the toll gate for dinner. Ah! Our luck. We stopped at a small roadside shop and finished our dinner and waiting for the others.Perhaps, I had been tooo fast. We waited for a long time for the others could catch up with us. Within about 45 minutes from that point we reached Tada foothill.

We parked our cars on the road. Took out our tarpaulin sheets, our sleeping mats and went to sleep instantaneously. The next day, we got up much earlier than the sunrise. Made a fire and prepared tea. We then split all the food items that we were supposed to carry on our trek. After we had our breakfast (a few idlies and a couple of vadas.) we started our cars and drove for another couple of kms to reach the parking lot.

We identified our leads and sweepers and started off on our treks carrying our backpacks. Initially it was a long walk with moderate ascent. Tired of walking, some of took a shortcut and started climbing. Soon we reached the leads and were waiting for the others to come. We took some rest at that spot before proceeding to climb again. There were a couple of nice viewpoint-like locations where we briefly halted for taking some snaps. We also crossed a dry stream on the way to the top.

We reached the top of Tada by noon. We were welcomed by a nice waterfall and a couple of small pools. Flash forward a few minutes, and all of us were under the falls, some of them diving from varying heights.

The speed of flowing water was unmatchable. We had free high power jacuzzi for a couple of hours in nature’s lap followed by a nice nap in the shade. We took a different path on our downward journey. At one point, we didn’t have a proper descent and had to tie ropes and climb down using that. It took quite some time for all of to get to the base of the mountain, but nevertheless it was fun. Actually, however hard it may seem at the beginning, it always feels so easy when you are done with it.

For some distance at the end, I was the one sweeping the group. In a while, we reached the actual Tada falls where most of the general public comes to. A few guys wanted to go to the top of the falls. Since it was already beginning to get dark, the others had already started towards the exit. It was six of us, stuck in the middle. Not with the group with that had left and not with the ones who went to the falls. We slowly started moving towards the exit, when it became completely dark. We had to take our torches out and walk among the slippery boulders. A bunch of non-CTC guys joined us. We didn’t exactly have an idea of which way to go. So we started walking in the stream. We got our shoes all wet. And then our pants. We were eventually half submerged in the water , by the time we found the exit. The early-birds were waiting for us there. Then we too took some rest there and waited for the rest of the gang to return.

Introduction session happened. It was quite interesting to interact with the people with whom you had spent the entire day. Nice idea of the CTC-Emperors to have introduction session at the end. One thing that was left was the dinner feast which we had at a dhaba on the highway. After filling our stomachs, we parted way and reached back our homes by 01:00. In all, an unforgettable trek.

PS: The photos that I took during the trip can be found at http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150474440750496.365889.501815495&type=3

That is when I realized that while getting the site up from the server error, I had deleted most of the plugins because one of them had been causing the problem I didn’t know which one. And at that time, I had also deleted the Akismet plugin. It was the one, which was protecting me from thousands of spam comments all these days. It had come preinstalled with all versions of WordPress shipped after 2.0. I didn’t actually realize its importance until it was gone. Akismet has premium plans as well as free plans. If you are running a small business blog or something that doesn’t run on WordPress, Akismet is a definitely a service worth paying for.

Few of us from Chennai took a train to Bangalore on Friday night and reached Bangalore station where we got into the Innova which was waiting for us and started off to Coorg directly from there. After stopping briefly for breakfast, we reached Ranganathaswamy Temple at Srirangapatna. (Only after reaching the parking lot did I realize that I had already come to this temple when I was in Mysore with my GA team fellas in October 2010).

The next stop was Namrodoling monastery (also called Golden Temple) in the Tibetan settlement of Bylakuppe. The place was almost identical to some of the monasteries that I saw in Ladakh, with similar paintings, dragon statues, monks etc.  After roaming around the shops nearby, we went to a forest (this one somewhat similar to Kuruva Islands in Wayanad), the name of which I don’t know because it was written only in Kannada. (Damn you!). (Update – The name of the place is Nisargadhama, which is an island similar to Kuruva formed by the river Kaveri). The entrance to the place had a rope bridge hanging over a river. We also went on an Elephant ride at the place. (This is not the Dubare Elephant Camp!). We spent some time there taking pics at the river and then among the bamboo culms with the sunrays emerging from between them.

Still water rafting was lined up next. At the entrance to the Dubare Forest, we got a chance to do some rafting. We got into an inflatable boat and the instructor gave a paddle to each one of us. He gave a couple of instructions regarding coordination and something which no one bothered to listen to anyway. We spent half an hour in the river rowing. It surely was tiring. (Now I understand why the Winklevoss brothers are hulks). We didn’t go to the Elephant Camp at Dubare and started off to our resort near Sunticoppa.

The great part about our trip to Coorg was the resort. Riverside Cottages. Set 8kms away from the nearest town, Sunticoppa, this place provided some awesome panoramic views. One old retired army officer owns the place. The dude came and gave us some gyaan about Coorg and its history since some 17th or 18th century.

As specified in the resort’s website, at night, the true glory of nature comes out in the open. One could see millions of stars just waiting for you to reach out and touch them. An amazing view. Really.

The next day we went to the river bank at the bottom of the hill near the resort. Then after a few pics with the owners of the cottages, we checked out. Our next stop in the journey was at the Sri Omkareshwara Temple followed by another temple the name of which I think is the Sri Bhagandeshwara Temple. Then we went to the birth place of Kaveri river, Talakaveri. A temple tank has been erected at the place, where most pilgrims wash their feet and some take bath. A few hundred feet above the tank level, lies the hilltop which provides an astonishing 360 degree panoramic view. After some pics at that spot, we proceeded to another view point on the way down where again we kept taking more photos.

After a very late lunch at Madikeri town and some coffee shopping, we went to Raja’s Seat where we watched the setting sun and got mesmerized in its magic. While waiting for the sunset, we also went on a tiny toy train. That was the end of the trip. From that place it was a long drive all the way to Bangalore.

For the road trip, thankfully, we bought an aux cable on the way to Coorg and we connected our phones and music players to the car stereo to listen to a huge collection of amazing songs whenever we were inside the Innova. I don’t think we listened to any song more than once, except for a couple of songs which we couldn’t resist listening twice.

With much newer versions of Android floating around, and mine still stuck in 2.2.1, I decided a couple of days back to ROOT my phone. And being a newbie to this whole rooting thing, I began to do a bit of research.

Here is what i found:
-You can find the HBOOT version by turning off your phone and then powering it on with the ‘volume down’ button pressed.
-Depending on the version of HBOOT, there are a few apps that would help you change your phone from S-ON to S-OFF.

-Once the phone becomes S-OFF it hardly takes few minutes to deploy a custom ROM.

-CyanogenMod seems to be the preferred community based custom ROM.

-**If something fails during the rooting process, your phone is ‘bricked’. i.e. it can no longer be used.**

-Most guides have a disclaimer for bricked phones saying something like “I am not responsible for your stupidity”.

Despite the last two points being significant deterrents, I am all set to root my phone. More updates in the subsequent posts as I proceed through the process.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Google, in their attempt to integrate Reader with their infant social network Google+, have killed that. They have totally removed the entire setup of following others and the Reader specific ‘share’ button. If I find something interesting, I can only share it on Google+, which I rarely use. Moreover, there is a big difference between sharing on Reader and Google+. When I am in a mood to read, I wouldn’t want to wade through zillions of crappy status updates.

And it seems Google just doesn’t care. Reader is going to stay like this and it wants people-who-don’t-like-it to move on.

In all, the new redesigned Google Reader is a big #Fail. It is now just a plain feed reader but a good one at that. Despite all this, I don’t think I’ll move on because I don’t think there is a better feed reader in the market yet.

If everybody had the latest browsers, both the users as well as web developers can breate easy.

6 months ago, when I was trying to upgrade the WordPress version on my blog, it crashed. And I had not been able to open my blog and I was getting Internal Server Error ever since. Somehow I couldn’t devote time for my blog. Heights of Laziness.

So last week, I got into FileZilla. Connected to my server. Took a back up all the WP related files and content. Deleted everything from the server. Downloaded a fresh copy of WP. Replaced the wp-config.php with the old one which contains all the db related data. Also replaced the wp-content folder from the backup.

All it took was 5-10 mins. No idea why I had been delaying this for so many months. Should blog regularly now.

Its an ingrained habit. I hate littering. Any plastic cover or paper that I happen to use always ends up in the garbage bin. If I don’t find one near by I keep it in my pockets and drop it off whenever I find one.

When I travelled to Munnar town, we found tons of litter thrown around near the roads. We had stopped nearby for breakfast. After our breakfast, guys started throwing the paper plates on the roads. I and a couple of friends got a cardboard box and requested everyone to put their waste in that box, so that we could throw it elsewhere. When we got into the bus with the cardboard box in our hands, the driver looked shocked and asked us to put the box away on the roads. We somehow convinced him that we wanted to throw it only at a garbage bin and not on the roads.

After all, when even software engineers have no sense of responsibility towards the nature, how can we expect uneducated people like drivers to understand its importance. Its a collective responsibility and we need to take some conscious effort to bring some change.

We at Chennai Trekking Club ensure that everyone coming to the treks respects nature. We don’t litter at the wonderful places we trek to. We enter the trekking area and leave the place as it was before. We carry garbage bags with us and make sure that we leave no trace.

I’d like to quote another famous trek blogger Sandeep – “One humble request to all the people planning to go to for treks. Please respect nature and remember other people. Never litter these wonderful places. Infact, it will be great, if you can pick up some of the litter (especially the non-bio-degradable) and carry it back. Please abstain from smoking and drinking when you are with nature. Even if you cant help it, atleast carry back cigarette buds and liquor bottles. If couple of us show some responsibility, we can keep these places clean and pristine for the coming generations!!!”

The movie is a sci-fi thriller directed by Duncan Jones, that plays with parallel reality, time travel and multi-dimensional view of life. Source Code is not exactly the type of code that I write daily. Source Code is an American Govt experiment which enables a person to cross over to another man’s identity for eight minutes or something like that. A military man(Jake Gyllenhaal) is used for the experiment. He is sent to locate a bomb in a train, find the guy behind it and prevent another bigger attack happening in the future. He is sent back to the train over and over again, gathering some clues each time, until he could solve the mystery behind who is responsible.

The movie is filled with twists and suspense.  He relives those 8 minutes again and again and again. Essentially the movie is just those 8 minutes thought out in multiple ways. Gyllenhaal does a good job after Prince of Persia but that isn’t sufficient. The character feels incoherent and doesn’t extract sympathy from the audience.

As far as excitement is concerned, it is very limited in the movie. It doesn’t keep you rooted to your seats. It could have been better. The problem with Source Code is the idea of the Source Code. It is totally vague, confusing and nowhere smart when compared to other sci-fi thrillers.