I am Back

Long time since I blogged. The days have been really tight in terms of the work. Lot of things also happened in the last 2 months since I stopped blogging completely. My last post was on Jun 09 about the FIFA World cup. It was more of a formality to capture the most happening tournament.

On the professional front also lot of things happened which kept me busy all these months. For about 2.5 weeks from 24th June till 11 July I was in London for the requirements gathering and system study phase of our new project. Keeping in mind the new engagement and the client a whole lot of things were covered in two weeks time. Trip to London was a welcome change for me. I went via Dubai in Emirates. Emirates must say is truly an international airline whether its the comfort they offer within the flight or the aircrafts they possess. Everything is out of the world. The journey to London takes somewhere close to 12 hours and the time difference is 4.5 hours in summer and 5.5 hours in winter. The difference comes because of the concept of day light saving. Daylight Saving Time (DST) as it is popularly called as allows to save energy since less artificial light would be required in the evening and makes the country more efficient in addition to the pleasant effect of lighter evenings.

In London, I visited a lot of places namely Big Ben, Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Tower bridge, Madam Tussauds, Greenwich (where there is a 0 degree meridian and GMT is set here only), Hyde Park, Canary Wharf, London Eye, Bank of England, Oxford Street and host of others. Madam Tussauds was perhaps the best attraction of my London visit. It was a quick trip and we entered just in time into the wax museum. I stayed in the company guest house at Deptford Bridge and my work location was in Liverpool street. Canary Wharf is the only area in London where one can find a few sky scrappers. Otherwise entire London has only old and historical building.

After I came back from onsite, it has been terribly busy for me in terms of the amount of workload. Last but one week I had clocked close to 100 hours in the office in a rush to complete the deliverable on time. This is my first weekend I am at home after close to 2 months time. We also had an internal audit for one of our projects and it was a nightmare and complete fiasco for the team.

Some updates from blog front. My Quiz blog (http://www.brandtags.blogspot.com/) has crossed more than 9000 hits in less than a year and in the month of July the blog is clocking somewhere 900 hits. My personal blog is clocking somewhere close to 6000 hits at the moment. Unfortunately, the quizzing activity has come to a halt and I have been receiving a lot of mails to start it again. This week will also see rebirth of the quiz site.

Recently in wake of the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai, Government decided to put a ban on the blogs and most of the blogs were blocked in this exercise. For close to a week, no one was able to access the blogs. Then there was a long debate over this issue and finally it was decided to lift the ban over the blogs. Must say terrorism can impact anything in this world.

When Italy won the world cup, I was in the flight traveling from Dubai to Hyderabad. More than the passengers who were least bothered about the world cup final, the head of the cabin crew was excited when Italy won. It was a well deserved victory for them together with the very infamous incident between Materrazi and Zidane which became the topic of the email forwards very soon.

Time management has become a very big problem now these days and working nights in the office is a usual affair. This sometimes is taking a toll on the health as it happened to me when I came back from Chennai last monday. Anyhow I am getting adjusted to this now and now the posts on the blog will be pretty frequent.