Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Sunset snaps over the Kabini river

Lazy evenings, No cooking! calm surroundings, No cleaning! gurgling river, No laundry! Just the calls of the cicada, crickets and the critters. Blissful atmosphere... Sitting and watching the sun go down the Kabini river over snacks and coffee... Heavenly!


Monday, November 14, 2011

The Tintin Treat!

Spontaneity is awesome.

Beautiful Sunday morning in Bangalore when we found ourselves at the movies with first row tickets to the Adventures of Tintin in the Secret of the Unicorn, in 3D. No time to even think whether a 3D movie would be good to be watched from the front row... Settling down in our seats and the movie is up!


 Tintin, the young journalist is swept into an treasure-hunting adventure when he innocuously buys a model of a ship at the flea market. He bumps into the whiskey drinking, but daring Captain Haddock, whose ancestor was the guardian of the treasure. Together, they team up against the descendent of Red Rackham- the pirate (Dr Sakharin) who is bent on hustling the treasure for himself.

Animating a already famous 2D character from a book into a animated person takes a lot of courage. I wasn't even sure whether that it would work. But Tintin in person, though animated, fit great. Just as sweet and loveable. Even the wind-swept hair was just too good. Amazing facial expressions, which are totally in tune with the character. Ditto for Haddock, Thompsons. Would have loved more if Snowy was drawn a bit more cuddlier and Castofoire had more of the parroty-nose!

The movie does not follow the book. Infact, it merges the stories of three books (Crab with the Golden Claws, Secret of the Unicorn and The Red Rackham Treasure) and also invents a bit more. Straying away from a well-written story was not even an issue. The stories were judiciously blended and with the extra seasoning, the end result was exciting.

And the 3D pep was awesome. It made the movie so grand and invigorating. The eagle chase through the streets of Baghar was excellently filmed and gave a huge yeah for the 3D!

All in all, the movie, released on 11.11.11 is a great watch if you have read the books and even more so if you have not. A treat to watch :)










Saturday, November 12, 2011

The last binary date of this century! 11.11.11


So, today was the most normal day with the most interesting date. Lots of hype around today- (its just a date!) Well, for me, it was just a normal day, although a pleasant one. Nothing life-altering or super lucky has occurred, though i have a bit more than 2 hours left in this nerdy new year as mashable nicely put it. And just had to write in a post just to get the date stamped on my blog. I scheduled my blog to be published at the chosen time using Blogger's scheduling mechanism :) Sweeeeet!



Thursday, November 10, 2011

Blogger vs Wordpress?


Blog it or Press it?


I am sure bloggers of the world would have gone through this critical question before embarking on their journey into the blogosphere. It is of vital importance too and spending some time pondering over it will make your blogging experience that much more pleasant and comfortable.

Customization: I think, a blog should reflect who you are; Creating a look that defines me and creating layout that i want will be my first priority. Both Wordpress and Blogger do a fundo job of helping you come up with "your" kind of atmosphere. Both Wordpress and Blogger gives you myriad themes you can choose from and you can still customize on top of that. There are also tons of free themes available for both Wordpress and Blogger available on the net. So, full marks to both Wordpress and Blogger for letting us setup a blog-shop fast and easy and settling us into a cozy, comfy zone easier. Though, i find Blogger more fun to write on as it allows much more color on the text.

Traffic and SEO: Both Wordpress and Blogger pull in traffic by themselves... Once you are registered and start to pour your thoughts out, traffic is routed to your blog by the power of the hosting sites themselves. Their excellent SEO, tag/labels, pretty much does a lot of the initial traffic for you.(Of course, your blog has to have excellent content to grow more!)
But, once your blog grows, you would want to keep up with the traffic, want to know where your fan base is from, which pages gets you more love, etc. Now, the leading traffic analyzing site is Google Analytics- which is free! And recently Google Analytics announced its new Real-time Analytics- which basically means that you can see which page your visitors who are currently on-line are on, where they are from, how much time they have spent on your blog and more. All this for free and the damper is that Wordpress does not allow the blogs hosted by it to be linked by Google Analytics. Which means, you dont get access to one of the best add-ons to your blog! It really is a killer for me. I have to rely on other tracking sites (there are alot of free ones available...) which sadly, cant come even close to Google Analytics. With blogger, it is just a cut and paste of code away from GA.

Organizing the content: An important aspect of blogging is a way to categorize and group up the content in your blog. Thereby, making it easier for people to be able to see it at a later date, look up for yourself and easier to link up the previous blogs to the newest ones (which is also a great SEO strategy, BTW) Blogger comes up with labels which seems so amateurish when compared to the categories and tags of Wordpress. Wordpress zips past Blogger on this one!

Widgets: Adding widgets is great fun and makes your blog more attractive, interesting, interactive and informative. Wordpress does not support Java script, Which means that interactive or dynamic widgets are not supported by Wordpress. While a lot of sites do support wordpress and write Wordpress-friendly non-JavaScript code, it cannot be expected all the time... Blogger steps up one notch here.

Safety: The main reason Wordpress doesnt support JavaScript is because it JavaScript could potentially be a threat to the safety of the site. I am sure this is super for a newbie blogger or a student blogger who definitely needs to be careful about the big bad world out there...

As a blogger, Content is King and no matter what the platform is, the words pouring from you makes it unique and attractive to the reader. And Blogger and Wordpress do a great job of displaying your blog out there for the viewers. If you ask me, Wordpress could just be perfect for a novice; It is easy, clean and straightforward. Blogger could just be for those who want to experiment a little and add a dash of color...

Anyways, on both platforms, under the settings tab, you can export and import blogs quite easily, thereby making things quite easy to erase a mistake :)





Cool Cochin Clicks

These clicks were made in a resort in Kerala, close to Cochin. The cottages in this resort is built on the backwaters of the Arabian sea.

 bridge leading to the resort
There were only a few cottages built on the backwaters. It was very quite and peaceful during the whole stay. We had to cross a small log bridge to reach our room.


  Resort in cochin built on the backwater
This is the cottage we stayed in... Pretty place! 

There were fishes in the backwaters too... But we didnt do any fishing!


The Arabian Sea is Vast!

The sunset was amazingly beautiful. We had a wonderful time playing in the beach. 

The Beach was clean and empty most of the time. 

Except for a bunch of fishermen and a few early birds like us.

It was so hard to leave this serene place and get home to reality. So i decided to click and click to take a piece of this place into my world. 

coconut trees at cochin resort


Photo Time Day one: Vast
Our World Tuesday
Skywatch Friday 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

My garden after rain

I adore clicking away right after the rain. The whole world seems all cleansed up and pure! The garden looks so fresh and green and oh! so inviting. As I step out of my abode, a fresh new whiff... the smell of  blooming flowers inviting the pollinators, the subtle scent of the green glass and the saturated soil begging for a mushy walk over them, the essence of the innocent little baby leaves sprouting out in various hues of green... Oh! What a wonderful world :)



Sky, Reflected!


Flower Art Friday
Floral Friday fotos
Color Connection 
Skywatch Friday
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