GotoYourLink.com

One of my friends asked me to email the Project Management Monitoring tools I use. Although it is pretty much basic I thought it will be  useful for some of my blog users and thus included in this blog entry…

Download Link

http://gotoyourlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Monthly-Consolidated-Report-By-Services-Template.xlsx

Download Link
http://gotoyourlink.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/PM-Progress-Report-By-Services-By-Contractors-Template.xlsx

Yes, Manual Full Wash For Just 30 Dhs !!!!

No queues, Easy to reach…

That is why this car wash is my favorite in Town.

My car wash attendant “Shammy” is from my native place. So no language problems. He does a very good job especially under the door is so clean that I fee very happy when I get in to the car!

BTW:  For 4WD it is 40 Dhs.

The location is just after Tasjeel on Beirut road towards Sharjah.

http://wikimapia.org/6955761/Tasjeel-Ghusais-751-al-Qussase-for-car-registration-by-eppco

When I posted nearly professional video at youtube, one of my cousins sisters asked this question. Yes, now a days a very good videos can be produced right from home. Here is what you want.

1. Digital Video Camera (preferably with a hard drive)

2. Laptop with maximum memory (RAM) possible.

3.  Ulead Video Studio 10 Installation CD

Now here is how you are going to do it.

1. Install  Ulead Video Studio 10 from the CD to your laptop

2. Put the camera on play mode and connect it to the USB port

3.Open Video Studio Editor

4. Click on Capture Tab

5.Click DV quick Scan

6.Select the videos you want to download to your PC

7.Now on the Edit tab and drag and drop those video clips to the time line.

8.Now click on the time line view so that you can see the Music track

9.You can either select the music from the list or record a running commentory.

10. Click on the title tab and create titles if required.

11. You may have to do some advanced editing which I will cover in the next post.

12. Now you are about to create the final movie. Click on Share and click create disk, the wizard will guide you thru the rest

This is the first time I am travelling in a double decker bus to sharjah. Although i have experienced it in India,London&Hong Kong, I assumed Dubai-Sharjah travell will be boring because of bumper to bumper traffic.

However it was contrary to my thinking . Within few minutes I boarded the bus moved out of Al Ghubaiba bus stati0n. It passed Shindaga tunnel in a breeze, I didnt like when it took the AlWuhaida road insread of Mumzar road But I can understand there are people at Centuary mall and AlWasel club the bus to pickup. I was able to reach Al Nahda in just 20 minutes and got a chance to capture some images on my mobile phone.

Three Surprises greeted me this New Year.
1. Residence Visa Rules have changed? The immigration staff says “10,000 is OK” for Dependents Residence Renewal.
2. Large number of newly setup Special counters for visa cancellation, the recession is in our door steps.
3. Even though my wife is with me in Dubai, the immigration system says she is out of the country!
I went to the immigration to renew my wife’s residence visa expired in Nov. It was not so crowded as I expected after the holidays. I managed to get the application by the typing center in just 10 minutes. The counter was too not much crowded hardly 5 people in the queue. However the cancellation counter was crowded. I now hear from reliable sources that there are more than 1000 cancellations per day !

The lady at the counter asked for the Salary Certificate which I was told by the typing center it is not required for renewal. I returned with the Labour Contract same day evening (they work on a night shift till 8 pm). They have accepted the Salary Certificate.  As a matter of interest I have asked what is the current requirement. The immigration staff says “10,000 is OK”. Are they crazy? People are suffering from the economic slow down and this would be further blow to the businesses. I did not ask further questions to confirm whether the new law is already in place.

She was about to pass my application but then told my wife is “black listed”. “Where is she” I said “here staying with me”. “From when?” “Long time around 10 years” “No baba when did she enter the country?” I said October 1st 2008 if I remember correctly.

One day visit to Khasab proved problematic in Immigration’s systems. I remember it was a mad crowd at the border. It is quite possible that they have not entered it properly in their systems.  I have been asked to go to section 15 and then section 2. I have shuttled between those two and then back to the residence visa section without much luck. Now I have been asked to “go to the border and put exit stamp”. I have abandoned the venture and returned to my office. My PRO has assured that he could resolve the issue…Lets hope ….

My wife has been asking me to fix or buy new Microwave for quite a long time. Yesterday she has given me a final warning. It is unwise to spend too much in recession so lets try to fix it my self. After all it is only a bit of smoke coming out when we try COMBI cooking.

With basic set of tools I was able to explore the mechanics. My 7 year daughter was very interested to help me unscrew it.

It did not take much time to find the bug.

The coil at the bottom of the rotating disc badly needed a cleanup!

I am generally a vegetarian occasionally a non-veg. When I was a child, I and my brother went for fishing. He managed to catch a fish and passed it to me for safe custody. I felt sympathy to the fish struggling for life and set him free by throwing it back to the lake.

Yesterday my wife asked me to buy large quantity of fish to be cooked for the church festival. We used to visit Shindaga fish market when we were staying in Dubai. After shifting to Al Nahda, it is bit too far so we buy fish from malls nearby. I was on my way back from Bur Dubai so it makes sense to buy fish from Shindaga. However even after spending 30 minutes I could not find a parking place, I have decided to buy from Lulu Hypermarket. They were running out of stock, left with few slices did not suite my needs. I have postponed my fish search for today, leaving options of Ajman(my friend recommends Ajman as best source of fish fresh from the sea) and Sharjah fish market.

 It was a fun to drive in the early Friday morning; this is probably the only time you could enjoy driving in this part of the world. I thought it is better to check Sharjah before heading to Ajman. There was a lot of katcha (unpaved) parking places available. The fish market is slightly changed from my last visit. I remember it was a sea shore but now can see more reclaimed land. The wide varieties of fish available on bargain prices are interesting. I made my purchase in just 10 minutes but they may take few minutes for cleaning. I used this time to look for some plants in the nearby Plant Nursery and later bought some purchase from the Vegetable Market.

One our friends suggested a group trip during the Eid holidays. Living in the UAE for quite some time, we haven’t visited Musandam so didn’t think much. We five families started without much of plan, not even a google search, one of our friends said, take the emirates road go straight to RAK and then to Khazab! But that didn’t quite work, luckily i had this road map which helped. Its 160 kms, via Emirates Road.
The road to Musandam was exactly as described above except the last bit. Instead of taking the dirt road you continue to drive till you find travel agent booths. By the time we reached the border(UAE exit gate) a long queue was already formed as it was Eid holidays. Most of the visitors were groups in multiple vehicles. In many cases the group leader collected all the passports and went to the gate. The security officers did not asked to show the Vehicle Registration card which most of them did not have at hand so had to exit from the queue. By the time they the queue they had a tough time convincing the the one
Already in the queue which eventually went to shouting and fighting cops had to intervene. However the guys at Oman entry gate was pretty fast. Because I did nt have Oman covered in my car insurance policy I had to pay Aed 100 at oman insurance booth next to the gate. Just after the entry to Musandam peninsula the drive was little more fun in between the mountain and the sea. We travelled about 30km and reached the only 5 star hotel in Musandam. We found a travel agent adjascent to the fuel station. However all the boats were booked the only slot available was 2.30 pm.some intelligence by asking the fuel station staff there are more agents if you drive further.not too far we found xyz travel&tours,for adults it is aed150 per person and free for children for a cruise on a dhow for 3 hours which includes soft drinks and snack if you are lucky you get a chance to watch dolphins. We all enjoyed the dhow drive relaxing on traditional piloows. But eventually get tired and there were no sign of dolphins. However we organised some games for children and traditional indian ‘antakshari’ to kill time. All of a sudden we noticed some dark moving objects by the side of the boat and people started screaming “dolphin”. That dramatically change the mood of the people. The boat drivers tactically positioned two boats to cover both sides of the group of dolphins which caused spectacular view of Dolphins racing along the boat.
We also spend some time on the beach but was not very impressed becacuse of the sharp stones.

My current web hosting at awardspace.com was due to expire. I was not very happy with their service primarily because of the frequent problems associated with the email service. I used to have problems receiving emails and delayed delivery. Also the website were taken down at many occasions for maintenance.


I was using awardspace.com primarily for hosting gotoyourlink.com and couple of business websites. Many of my major website hosting was done at hostgator.com which gave no trouble so far (fingures crossed). So I am pretty sure to move gotoyourlink.com to hostgator.com than any other hosting provider.

However, I have got only couple of days to completely move the web sites to the new hosting. From my experience I know it is only going to take couple of hours if it is a plain website ( if I own the domain name, no databases, no sub domains etc). However gotoyourlink.com has got few databases and sub domains. I do not think it is that simple. I am particularly worried about my blog posts. I have the habit of taking a backup of the blog posts using the wordpress tool. However I am nervous about the short of time and the amount of pictures I may have to upload is quite a bit. The internet links in UAE are notoriously bad on uploading(Uploads are only 1/4 of downloads)

Quite obvious I have googled to see if any one has written about it.

http://cormacmoylan.com/blog/software/how-to-transfer-your-wordpress-blog-from-one-host-to-another-host.eire


After few hours of effort I gave up ! It is easier and cost effective to renew the hosting than wasting couple of days of my time. Also awardspace promised better support and 3 month extension for the renewal.

One of my Wireless Technicians (Babu) recommended Wayandu(kerala, India) he used to visit as he is from near by district. I liked the idea as many of us (the Mallus) talk about tourist places elsewhere in the world but hardly talk about the wonderful places in Kerala the home state. Before heading to India I have googled Internet so that I have some information to book the hotel etc. After few minutes I came across this site enteveedu.co.in offers home stay.

We never experienced

home stay and thus decided without much further research.i took their contacts and called after reaching Kerala.we booked for 3 nights and also booked the train tickets to Kozhikkode(Calicut)they have arranged pickup and site seeing tour on a Toyata Innova.

However we had to postpone the journey for one day as there was a hartal(for those who are not familiar with India especially Kerala;this is one of the painful political problem;which would make the state in a stand still as there would not be any transport and commercial activity).

We boarded the Kannore express (train no 6347 Trivandrum-Mangalore) at about midnight and reached
Calicut at 6:20am.The driver(Mr.george) was waiting for us at the station.we stopped at
Adivaram at 8.30 for breakfast before the uphill drive. On the way we visited Pookot lake, it was not open for public (too early) so we went for a short site seeing just around it.

Children love birds,2dogs and 2 puppies.

After the Traditional Kerala lunch we started off to Muththanga wildlife sanctuary via the town SulthanBatheri.
Entrance ticket was INR 440 including a Mahindra Jeep with driver and a forest guard. We could not manage to see Elephant or Tiger but the children were happy to see Deer, Peacocks, Lankoon Monkeys, Eagle and Kattupoth(Wild Asian Buffalo).The next day we went to Edackal cave, short trekking was involved, but even my elder parents did make it and enjoyed every bit of it. Again, children enjoyed feeding the monkeys on our way up and down.Then we visited Ambalavayal Heritage Museum and Agriculture farm.We also visited the tea plantations and Soochippara waterfalls.Banasura dam is a wonderful place , we enjoyed the boating even though the light rain disturbed us.

I highly recommend enteveedu.co.in for home stay. The service was very good and the price was very competitive to the Hotels around Wayanadu.

Other travel blog entries…

No summer vacation plans yet? Try Salala !

Quad Biking at Hatta, Dubai Festival City, Madinat Jumeirah

Weekend at Al Mamzar Park