This year’s birthday was yet again celebrated in the best place I could possibly think to celebrate - Mangalore. Once again they have written a truly wonderful writeup about me. Check it out…

Arun Ravindran

Hmmm..so, the dude in the pic is celebrating his birthday.does he need a formal introduction from us or what??!!! If ever there was one guy about whom it was hard to find a description in just one word, then it is Arun Ravindran.call him a gadget freak, regular blogger, an ardent music lover, photographer, pencil drawing enthusiast, flash programmer..and he will answer to all of your calls!! Because, he is no ordinary person, for him being extraordinary is just another day!!

He was one of the active participants in this year’s Ittesbin Skit from ES. Didn’t get to see him onstage? That’s because he was busy back stage giving voice. And don’t think that his voice talent was limited to just one character; more than one role in the ES skit was backed up by his voice!!

Don’t just think that he is good at the extracurricular stuff; he is one of the back bones of his project team. He had joined Infosys in May 2004 as an A.CON in ES (EAI). After working for the UBS and BP at onsite, he came to GAPEAIR2 project and to Mangalore.

He is one witty person who always likes to see the smile on other people’s face. He is also an avid reader and he constantly updates his blog. Maybe because he is also interested in drawing, all his “sweets at my deskFCFS” mails are associated with maps showing the easiest route to his cubicle!!!

Word has leaked out to the smilES team that he has to keep at least two parties in the food court (excluding all the other parties outside) so as to make all his friends happy, such is his popularity in this Minfy!!

Lets all wish this talented dude a very happy birthday!!

Check out these snaps too

Of course you can enjoy them directly at Flickr

* - The title is inspired from the expansion of Infy rock group - YANTRA which stands for the awesome expansion “Yet another night to rock away”.

Last week was very eventful for me. I have been keeping myself close to 100% utilized in one way or the other. Rather than bore your with a long rambling of events, let me tell you some of the highlights

• I co-directed a skit for an annual cultural program which won the first prize. Among other things, I also did voice-over, sound editing and camera work. Camera work? Yep, that’s right, we also played some funny ad spoofs in the skit. One of which has become a huge hit and a viral video of some sorts. Check out the Malabar Gold Sandals ad at Youtube and post your comments.

• Designing an Intranet portal to celebrate our unit’s successes. Among many sections, the quiz section was a dynamic application written in ASP that was visited by atleast one participant every 3 seconds. Why ASP you would ask. The answer is that we use an NTLM system to authenticate the users. The server was windows 2005 which somehow made installation of PHP very tricky and there wasn’t enough time to try out the Python alternative

• Overcoming my learning curve for GIMP. GIMP was always known to be as capable as Photoshop. But I never got around to learning its GUI as easily. In office, I have started to use GIMP exclusively for designing mailers, newsletters, websites and what what not. I have to say that some of its features are yet to be found in Photoshop, but I much faster in the latter. I also use Inkscape in a small way. I’m trying to move towards vector designing tools for all my Photoshop needs.

• Learning Haskell especially after noticing its sudden rise in popularity. Okay this is truly slow progress. I still have no idea how to make non-trivial applications in Haskell. But I’m reading SICP and Haskell textbook in parallel.

That’s all for the round-up folks. I’m working with a new client these days, hence (unsurprisingly) learning (yet) a new data warehousing tool called Datastage. I shall post my sister’s wedding snaps soon.

A quick flashback to 2002, when we were just in the first year of MBA at TAPMI. The culturals were coming up and I was asked to make something witty and catchy for my team called ‘Hum’. The following poster is a morph of a well known Amitabh Bachan, Rajnikanth starer mega-budget Hindi film of the same name. Almost all the faces have been morphed with members of our team:

Here is a little slideshow of the photos I took, from my Cambridge trip

Of course you can enjoy them directly at Flickr

The new looks of the site can be credited to the awesome wordpress plugin K2. It handles AJAX search box at the right column (try it out now :) ), rotates the ArunRocks banner with every page refresh with the pictures that I have shot and of course it has a list of my favourite links at the sidebar.

Of course, banners are not the only artwork that I did. In fact, I have been thinking about having a cool logo for ArunRocks for sometime now. Something a bit symbolic yet not too abstract. So I kind of thought about the name a bit and came up with the one on the left in about 15 mins on Photoshop.

Try to guess what the logo stands for before you read ahead. The inverted music symbol obviously stands for the two ‘r’s (in small letters) in arunrocks. If you haven’t noticed already Arun Rocks clearly hints at my initials. So the double ‘r’s have a double interpretation here. The letters are tilted and obviously ‘rocking’. The red background is also inspired from the same ‘Rock’ theme. This appears as the icon of this site on your browser, also called the favicon