Wela's Blog

I have been a BIG fan of fast food restaurants for a very long time. Good old McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut and the new Merry Brown, Mr. Chico Texas, and few other joints are in the list. Most of them are providing a very good service and some good quality food for a decent price. Some might say the price is steep. Most of the times the quality of food is really good. Some of these places even take daily feedback from customers about the quality of service and food, which is great.

In my case, during my old job I use to go to McDonald's for all three meals for about 8 months solid because it was just 2 minutes walking distance from my old office and I was in a crazy schedule. I mean amount of time I have saved thanks to McDonald's is huge. It's just you walk in, buy what you want, eat it super fast, and walk out ... just 10 minutes for the whole meal. Well! I don't believe that you get fat by eating from these fast food joints.

I have no doubt about the quality or cleanness of food in any of these place. But if you closely pay attention you'll notice that sometimes they serve really crappy food. If you goto KFC in Majestic City on a Saturday afternoon/evening and get a coke, sprite or any beverage for that matter you'll get a really flat one ... not fresh at all ... not even cold enough to drink, which is terrible. My experiences with Pizza Hut is really funny. Well! not funny actually ... sometimes it's pissing me off. For our monthly user group meetings when I order pizza and request for about 40 cups to be send with the order, most of the times they never do that. There were many cases which I had to ask the delivery guy to bring those back. Sometimes the person who is taking the order over the phone says ... ''Sorry, we can send only 20 cups'' ... that is really stupid and they are totally out of their common scene. I mean when I'm ordering for 40 people they should send enough cups. Most of the times I had to blast the s**t out of them to get the order right. Last week I dropped into the newest place in town, Mr. Chico Texas ... and had to wait about 15 minutes to get what I ordered ... that was really not fast. So i'm not going to go there until I here some good news about the speed of service. And the food was not that great. In all these places sometimes you get buns (even in the main burger meals) which is terrible and feels like you are trying to eat a sponge or an old bread.

Anyways, i'm still a big fan of fast food joints, because the food is good (85% of the times) ... Yum! Yum! Yum! ... and it saves a lot of time in my busy schedule.

It's TODAY !!!

Most of the colleagues are on leave. So it's a boring day @ office. Roads are empty which reminds about the Christmas mood. Also both the car parks in Nawam Mawatha are pretty empty which again makes me wonder why are we working today. Only fun part is driving with absolutely ZERO! traffic ... it's awesome.

Anyways, there is a long list of pending task items to complete. So time to get back to work.

Was down with a flue for couple of days so couldn't even wish ya'll ... anyways ... it's not too late ... so folks ... Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ... Have Fun.

Got this from a friend of mine couple of days back ... interesting ....

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too.
Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 56 plepoe can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt! if you can raed tihs forwrad it.

Imagine Cup has reached the level where it is one of the major events in Microsoft Sri Lanka event calender. Also among the university students it has become one of the key events. Imagine Cup 2008 is already on the move where over 300 Sri Lankan students have already registered. i'm expecting that this number will grow up to 500. www.imaginecup.lk is the website dedicated for the local software design competition. All the details will be published in this site. Overall there is a lot of interest about the Short Film category. I think this is because team 'Tear' from University of Colombo School of Computing made it to the world 6 finalists last year. Since things are started well ahead our students have sufficient time to plan their solutions well. All the best to all the competitors.

This is not actually a new feature. It's been there for quite some time. Strange that many Power Point users don't know about this. Briefly this is what it is ...

While you are creating the slides in PowerPoint you can enter the presenter notes at the bottom. The purpose of this presenter notes is basically to give some notes to the speaker so he knows what and when to speak. But have you ever wondered how to display these 'speaker notes' while doing a presentation.

What you have to do is go to the Slide Show tab in Office 2007 ribbon and in the Monitors group check the 'Use Presenter View' check box. You need more than one monitor to use this feature, because the whole idea is, one view is displayed to the audience and a seperate view displayed to the presenter. So if there is only one monitor is connected it'll give an error message as 'This feature is for use with more than one monitor, but only one monitor was detected. To see if your computer can display on multiple monitors, click the Check button'. Here you have to click the Check button and when it opens the display settings dialog, configure the multiple monitor settings. If the monitor settings are OK it won't give any message.

Normal view projected to the audience

Special 'Presenter View' which the speaker sees. Notice the slide view with the speaker notes

Shot displaying both views on the projection screen and the laptop screen.

Try this out. This will help you to do a better presentation, because it helps you to see what is next in the slide series, and key talk points are mentioned in the Speaker Notes Pane in the Presenter View etc.

Yup! Office 2008 just hit RTM ...

Windows folks ... don't get too excited, this is Office for Mac.

http://blogs.msdn.com/macmojo/archive/2007/12/12/rtm.aspx

Just thought of starting to write some technical stuff in the blog. I'm still not planning to write any codes in the blog :) ... it'll be just some very useful and funky tech stuff. So going to start with a small write up about Office 2007.

Do ya'll know that there are three UI themes in Office 2007. Well! this is only for the applications which has the Ribbon User Interface. That includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Default theme is a light blue which I think is a dull color. Other two themes are Silver and Black. I think the black one is the best and it rocks. Click on the Office Button on the top left corner and Select the Options button at the bottom of the menu. This will open up the Options dialog box. Under the Popular Tab you'll find an option called Color scheme and there is a drop down in front. just select the scheme you want and hit OK. This will change the color scheme of your Ribbon UI. More stuff later ...

Just found this thread in Gizmodo about Toshiba has released 128 GM Solid State Hard disks.
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/solid-state-drives/toshiba-introduces-3-new-ssd-flavors-128gb-is-the-tastiest-332171.php

First hard disk I had in my first computer had about 400 MB and the second one had about 8 GB and today it's over a Tera byte. Roughly it has taken over 10 years for us to reach the 1 TB limit in the mechanical old fashioned hard disk (I think it's ok to say its old fashioned now). But Solid State technology within about an year has reached 128 GB. If you to the calculations by the end of the year 2008 we should be able see 1 TB Solid State disks. Awesome, but unfortunately the technology is bit too expensive. Anyways no doubt that the price will come down in the near future.

Couple of days ago I downloaded the movie Transformers Hi-Def version which is a whooping 9 GB. It took almost a day to download it, yeah! just a day ... with my new Dialog WiMAX connection it is possible.

Even though I have a large collection of hi-def video clips, short documentaries etc, this is the first time i got a chance to download a full Hi-Def movie. Gotta tell ya ... it's awesome. The level of detail you can see in a Hi-Def video is unbelievable. I think it's worth paying that extra $$$ to experience the Hi-Def experience. So it's trying to speed up things with 'Wela's Hi-Def movie rig fund' ... anybody want to contribute, donate ... you are welcome :)

This is really nuts. If someone asks me how long it take for me to come to office from home ... the answer is 10 - 90 minutes. Yup today it took me only 10 minutes to come to office. But when the traffic is tight, generally if I leave home after 7 AM it becomes a different experience, it takes about 30 - 40 minutes to get to office. If I leave home after 8 AM it is a disasters, because then the trip takes 1 1/2 hours. If I get caught @ the thorana junction railway crossing it becomes worst. Anyways, there are plans about building an overhead bridge over this railway crossing. Lets wait and see. I might get luck to see it happen during my life time.

Can't afford to loose so much of time everyday.

If you have noticed there are no road blocks in the road these days. Somebody has filed a fundamental rights case against the police that the check points are illegal and the guy won the case, and after the that police removed all the check points. Well! the road blocks. I can't imagine the damage this is doing to the national security. Even though everybody hates road blocks and check points, I think it is a serious requirement at this moment. How many suspects were captured at these random checking. So we all should co-op with the military and police folks on the inspections.