Woo Hoo. I can see bright light at the end of the tunnel. This couple of weeks have been interesting. I will go through some of my experiences next week. But for now the news is that I have got an offer at Accenture Australia. I am excited and can't wait to join the office. The work is related to what I have been mainly engaging now and that is training and training content development. The exciting thing is I am looking forward to working in Melbourne CBD. Working in the CBD is just so lively!

I will be trying both driving in the city and taking public transportation and see how both of them compare to start with. I am excited about blogging my work experiences there, but will find out about what their blog policies are etc. etc. So does anybody else who is reading this blog works at Accenture Melbourne office? If so we can create a bloggers group of our own "Accenture Bloggers Group" if they don't have one already.

This will also be a good chance for me to catch up with people/bloggers working in the CBD. If you want to do so, just ping me and we will organise something up.

More info to follow in coming days and weeks..

Wow, what a simple and powerful idea. Sharing a extra bed that you might have with a fellow blogger visiting from other cities. Extrabed.in is a wiki where you can list your city and as to what you got to offer there. The idea is you offer somebody to stay at your place when they are visiting your city and next time they are in your city, you can stay at their place. You save money and you got to interact with like minded people rather than sitting alone and watching TV in the hotel room.

There is a need for more people to get on their site with a possibility of meeting really cool people.

Bloggers • Extrabed • Extrabed.in

Bloggers • Extrabed • Extrabed.in

I am a great believer in expressing joy and love which I do from time to time . There are many ways to express love but the one that I am going to talk about today is expressing love with greeting cards. I love to give cards to my lovely wife but then knowing her, she would hate if I spend heaps of money behind cards and on top of that I do not get personal satisfaction. Also ready made greeting cards do not always give the message that you want to give out. Hence I prefer to make my own greeting card.

Of course there are online sites which offer free greeting cards, but they just don't do the trick for me.

There are couple of ways to do this. One is to make it all by your hand and write on it and second is to use your computer, Internet skills to make one personalized greeting card. Obviously being a geek, I prefer the second method and also it does not show my incompetency at not knowing how to draw properly.

What all do you need to make a greeting card yourself?

1. A4 or any other suitable size paper. Possibly good quality paper is desired is you are going to print
2. Sketch pens, pencil, rubber, ruler, cutter, color pen
3. If you are going to use computer to make the card then you might need connection to the Internet to get photos/content etc.
4. A color printer
5. One could use simple software such as Microsoft Paint or sophisticated online tools such Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Photoshop

If you are going to make use of your creative skills and make your own card painting or writing on them, but there is no problems at all. It's great. But if you are one of those who wants to use Internet and computer to create greeting cards then read on.

First of all decide on the theme of the greeting card. What message is the card going to give. Based on the theme you will need to either find content/write content and also you will have to find suitable pictures for it. Once the theme is decided one could use the power of Internet to look for pictures. One can look for pictures on Google Images or websites such as Flickr. For Valentine Day you can search for tags such as Valentine or Valentine Day on Flickr

Save the desired image to your hard disk.

Now as said before you can use either tools such as Microsoft Paint or tools such as Microsoft Publisher to create cards. I have used Microsoft Publisher 2007 for the examples that I am showing. Microsoft Publisher 2007 already comes with greeting card templates which you can select easily.

Select the right template, select the correct paper size you want to use for the greeting (make sure your printer supports that paper size you select). Remove/insert the pictures you downloaded from the net before. In the text areas, modify the default text to personalized text content. Modify fonts to match it all, preview it and viola you are nearly done.

The picture above shows how the card can be folded as it is all printed on a A4 size paper on one side. When you print out the paper, make sure you fold it carefully so it align the paper borders.

The result is your own personalized love filled greeting card which nobody would have seen before. Well this can take as much time you want to give to this process but I think you can create your own personalized greeting card in less then 15 minutes all up. Below are some sample pics of greetings that I have created from pictures that I have borrowed from Flickr.

The joy comes from the work that you put in creating the card starting from selecting the right picture to deciding on what the perfect content is that should go in the card. It's simple and it's fun, something that you will remember for a long time. I bet when you send e-cards you might not remember which card you sent after a week or two!

Valentine • Valentine Card • Valentine Day

Valentine • Valentine Card • Valentine Day

Happy Valentine's Day my friends. I hope you have a great day today. Well today is somewhat special for me in many senses. My wife Komal comes back from India today and I will be seeing her in next 20 hours and also because I will be seeing my mom with her too.

Komal comes back to Melbourne after more then 5 months in India. We went there together after my father passed away and she is in India since then looking after my mom and the affairs in India. She not only comes back on Valentine's day, but she will be seeing her own house for the first time as well. No matter how many pictures you have seen, but I bet looking at your own house and feeling it is totally different. Seeing your dream come true will be awesome. So I think it would be kind of emotional for us. It would also be emotional because my mom is coming to Australia and this time she is alone. In late 2005, she and my father visited Australia and we all hoped that next time they will visit, our house will be ready and we would have moved in. Of course we have moved in, but my father won't be here to see it. The last pictures that I have off my father is when they left for India in late November, 2005. I am sure my mom will have many sweet memories from her last visit to Australia.

So what surprises have I for them? I am going to surprise them by decorating the house a bit and making a Valentine day card myself specially for Komal and a special dinner for three of us. I have already cleaned the house .

Valentine • Valentine Day

Valentine • Valentine Day

What have I done. I forgot to read instructions on all my clothes while putting them in laundry. Result, I have spoiled my 6 new pair of clothes and they are all grayish in shade now . Who's the culprit? My cheap $10 black top that I bought couple of years back. This has also affected my bed sheet (which was white designer sheet) and my towel (which was red and white before, now it's read and gray!! ). I won't feel like wearing or using these clothes again and Komal is going to strangle me once she hears of this.

Note to Self :-

1. Always read the labels
2. Have your brains switched on while doing the laundry
3. Follow no. 3 if not done yet
4. Stop buying cheap color fast clothes!

Color Fast • Common Sense • Laundry

Color Fast • Common Sense • Laundry