Wela's Blog

As uaual the schedule got nuts and couldn't blog about this.

Last Saturday we had our first MVP open day event. Manzi was in charge of organizing the things and he did a kick ass job. Selected destination was Royal Palm Hotel @ Kaluthara. We were planing to start the drive @ sharp 9 AM, but guess what ... as usual we started bit late. How can we start early and break the traditions. Once we got there first thing in our agenda was to have the planning meeting before we start anything with the booze. Meeting went on about 45 minutes and we discussed about all the .NET Forum activities for the next couple of months, which included stall at Tech.Ed, Deepdive session, Community Day etc. So guys stay tuned ... there's going to be lot of cool things happening in the near future. After the planning meeting it was all fun + fun + fun. From the MVP team Manzi, Jinath, Pras, Dinesh, Padman and me participated. Merill and Buddhike couldn't make it. And from Microsoft Alan and Indica Joined (a big thanks to Alan for initiating the whole thing). and we invited our buddies from the .NET forum ... Razor, Casper, Charith, Chandana, Rajah etc. but Chandana and Rajah couldn't make it. Looking forward for the next MVP Open day ... who wants to join ?

On July 3rd I opened a new account at the Nations Trust Bank. Actually a sales gent from the bank came to meet me and he processed the whole thing. at that time he was really helpful and it happened smoothly. But until today I haven't received the pass book or the ATM Card. Last time when I called the guy it was about a month back and he promised me to deliver the card. But he never showed up.

As usual my schedule was busy and I couldn't follow the case up. Finally got some free time yesterday and I went to the Colombo 03 branch to check what happened. And they called the Nugegoda branch (account was opened @ the nugegoda branch) and found out the sales guy no longer works there and his superior officer promised to deliver everything within the next week?  

Today also I got some free time, so I decided go to the Nugegoda branch and close the account and finish it off. Because there is no point in having an account like this. After I explained the situation branch Manager came and explained that there has been an issue with the sales guy and he was fired. Branch manager was really helpful. So I decided not to close the account. They issued the passbook immediately and the ATM will come latest by Monday.

I was actually planning to maintain this account as my primary account from September onwards. Considering what has happened there is no way I'm going to do that. I'm having second thoughts on continuing the account !!!!!   Because ....

• If the card or the passbook is not delivered to a customer isn't it the responsibility of the bank to check why?
• If I didn't get a time to go and check it yesterday what will happen? Account will be just there and I will never have access to it ... is it?
• If the sales guy was fired shouldn't the immediate officer look into what he has been doing? Why did they wait till a customer complains.

Anyways thanks to the Branch Manager and the other Gent for explaining the situation and helping out.

Has anybody else experienced similar cases with the Nations Trust Bank?

I have installed Windows Desktop Search Beta 3 because every time I open Outlook 2007 it says ... dude .. you need Windows Desktop Search to perform search stuff. And now it is taking up about 200mb of memory and a considerable percentage of the processing power. I have kept the machine on for several hours for it to do it's indexing stuff and give all the resources to me, but the dang! thing stays up all the time.

What to do? I badly need the folder wise search facility in outlook. Without it I'll be lost and will be wasting lot of my time to look for things. Maintaining several mail accounts and many folders is not an easy task. Windows Desktop Search Beta 3 is very useful but very resource hungry.

I'm wondering .. is it ever going to stop this indexing process?

Imagine Cup 2007 is going to be @ Korea and the theme for the competition is 'Imagine a World where Technology Enables a Better Education for All'.

Sorry about the logo is not that clear. just took it from a photo I shot at the world festival. Couldn't find a good quality logo in the net yet :)

It is strange that the world festival was not very big in terms of the head count in the audience. Last time it was couple of thousand in that big auditorium. Anyways that's not the important thing. All the required people were there. I think that's enough. World festival was filled with couple of interesting and inspiring speeches, Indian modern cultural dancing items and of course the prize giving. Following is the final results.

Short Film invitational is a very interesting category in the imagine cup. Teams who made it to the world finals are given the challenge to do a short film within 36 hours. So basically they have to work 36 hours straight. and the out come was really amazing. Thursday evening we got the chance to see all the short films. I loved the Canada and Poland films which made First and Second places later on.

Thursday was a very long tired day because the day started very early morning with a long ride from Agra to Delhi. I'll tell more details about this long trip later :)    And then the software design final six presentations happened and after that there was the digital theater which showed all the short films etc.