Happy New Year

I wish you all very happy New Year 2007.
May all your wishes come true.
 

Gmail Mail Fetcher

Did you check out the new feature in Gmail that enable us to fetch mails from up to 5 different pop3 servers. You will find the mail fetcher in Settings / Accounts. With 3 easy steps you can view mails from your other mail accounts using Gmail itself. I just added my other mail accounts to gmail. This is really cool... Now I can use Gmail as universal mail account where I can access all my mail accounts form one place. It's really fast as well. But I read that this feature is not yet available for all the gmail accounts. Don't be late, check out your Gmail settings now...





 

Wow… It has been a wonderful year

With another year is coming to an end, I thought to do a brief recap of this year’s activities.

Wow… It has been a wonderful year for me. So far 2006 has been one of the best years in my life. I gained tons of experiences and knowledge this year that will help me to gain success through out my life.

I started blogging on March with a very small welcome note . And also March was a great month since our proposal for the Imagine Cup 2006 Software Design local competition was selected for last five. So begin the hard working time. But all that hard work and countless sleepless nights finally paid off when we won the IC local competition on May 31st. It was one of the happiest days in my life. I had to do a 10 min presentation about our system in front of nearly 300 people. My first presentation of that kind. Participating and wining Imagine Cup was the greatest thing happened to me in last year.

In June I participated for our 2nd batch trip. Two day trip to Sinharaja world heritage rain forest. Most remembered thing in that trip was that I slipped off form a rock, when we went to see a beautiful waterfall on the way to Siharaja and wounded my right small finger. I still have a mark in my finger to remember that wonderful trip.

July and August was very busy months. I had to participate for lectures and parallely prepare for IC world final in Agra India. And also had cover lot of subject matters that I missed during the preparation for the IC local competition. So I couldn’t post a single blog entry during that time. To make the things worse we had 5th year anniversary at FIT . We had number of events to celebrate our 5th year anniversary including multi religious ceremony, an IT exhibition and a cricket tournament. We exhibit our IC winning project Panchayudha at the exhibition. It was a huge success with lots of good comments from the public.

We fly to India on August 5th to participate for Imagine Cup world finals. It was another great thing happened to me this year. Even though we couldn’t make it to the 2nd round it was a great experience to interact with all those great young guys and girls from all over the world. During that short week I managed to learn a lot and got the chance to visit great Indian historical sites like Taj Mahal, Agra Fort and managed to get a glimpse of the Indian life style and people.

Fun ended soon after we landed in Colombo…. I had to prepare for the Level3 Semester1 exam which was going to start on just 3 days. It was a very very busy time period. It was not easy to study six subjects in just a few days (Big lesson I learned). But given the circumstances I think I have done the exam well, even though this was the worse exam for me up to this date.

New chapter of my life opened up soon after the exams, Internship period at Navantis SL. This was a long waited thing for me. I always wanted to see what exactly happens in the industry. I’m still at Navantis undergoing my training. It was bit difficult at the beginning to catch up with the work, but after few days I got into the track. Life remained same ever since. Going to office in the morning and coming home in the evening. I understood that working is quite different from the university life some times it’s very boring, doing same thing over and over again.

After months of delays and tons of problems we started the implementation of the Financial Planning System for Mr.Pattrick . Our very short experience in internship helps a lot for it. With it more work come to my shoulders. After I come home around 8pm I had to start working on Pattrick project, I usually do that work from 9.30 to 11.30. It’s not easy, but what to do… If you promise for some thing you have to do it. And all weekend were spent on project meetings and implementation.

Few weeks back I did my first technical session for our super joiner batch on Introduction to .Net and Programming with C#. I was a wonderful experience to share knowledge with others.

When I look back my year’s activities I think this was a successful year for me with lots of excitements and achievement. I really think that I’ve laid a good foundation to my future in this year. Lot of lessons learned, experiences gained… And I thank every body who help me to spend a wonderful year. I’m looking forward to welcome year 2007. Hope it also will be a year of success…




 

Navantis Orange Day!



We Navantis team in colombo today enjoyed a "Orange day". It was just a fun event where all the people come to work wearing orange color dresses. It was wonderful sell most of the guys and gals wearing orange today. Most of the girls had wear orange dresses but unfortunately only handful guys came to work in orange. This was the first of it's kind at Navantis. So It was a big success for the first try. May be in next time we'll see more orange dresses; hopefully.


More photos...
 

Manage Your Time

Time management is one of those skills no one teaches you in school but you have to learn. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if you can’t organize information well enough to take it in. And it doesn’t matter how skilled you are if procrastination keeps you from getting your work done.
Penelope Trunk, a columnist at the Boston Globe, summarizes some great tips that coming from the blogosphere. She lists ten important tips to get a better handle for your work and focus to achieve productivity:
  • Don’t leave email sitting in your in box.
  • Admit multitasking is bad.
  • Do the most important thing first.
  • Check your email on a schedule.
  • Keep web site addresses organized.
  • Know when you work best.
  • Think about keystrokes.
  • Make it easy to get started.
  • Organize your to-do list every day.
  • Dare to be slow.


Read 10 tips for time management in a multitasking world for more details...

 

New Google Toolbar Beta

Beta version of the new Google tool bar 3 has been released yesterday. The new version of Google Toolbar for Firefox adds the features that were available only in the IE toolbar and a special bonus.

The latest version of Google Toolbar makes it easy to send snippets from web pages by email, SMS. It's also easy to have a blog without actually writing too much original content.


you can download and install the new beta version from here.
 

Ooh No Exam Results are out...

Our Level 3 Semster1 Exam result have been released yesterday. I got mixed results this time. They rage from A+ to C. Ok, I have to admit that L3S1 exam was the worst exam I had in my undergraduate life.
Main reason for the poor performance in the exam is ..... I didn't study well in this semester. Yes I have to admit it. But it also had fair reasons. I had devoted lot time to prepare for the Imagine Cup Local competition and then for the world finals. The time I devoted was well worthed since we won the IC Sri Lanka local competition beating more than 40 teams.
Exam started on 15th Aug and we had to participate for the IC world final in India from 5th to 12th Aug. So didn't had any time to study.... Given the circumstances I think I have done well. (But now I fell that I could have done the exam little bit better...) .
I have learn lot of things in that semester. I'm hoping to do next exam (L3S2) much much better....
 

New Layer in Google Earth

Google have introduced a new Geographic Web layer to Goolge Earth. Now you can see content from;

while you using GE.




The places described in those site will be shown in small wikipedia globe or blue Panoramio star or Google Earth Community yellow i icon. Simply by clicking on that icon you can view that content.




Cool...
 

Keystroke program launcher for windows...

This is the new member of my Must have program list. I just found it today when I was reading in the lifehack website. When I read about the inbuilt search facility in the windows startmenu in vista I loved it. But since I didn't got vista installed I never got the chance to fell it. Launchy is something smiler to it. Just pres Alt+Spase and type few words and Enter.... That's it. You don't have to search through the start menu to find a program. You can even use this to go to files and folders...
Other wonderful thing with Launcy is it is Open source and comes up with multiple skins. If you wish you can create your own skin as well.
Sounds interesting.... Try it and see for your self.
You can also directly download Launchy form Sourceforge.



 

Navantis 2nd B'day Celebrations

Yesterday Navantis SL where I do my internship, celebrated it's second birthday. Navantis has been started only with 9 employees and now it has more than 80 employees. B'day was celebrated in traditional Sri Lankan way with Kevum and Kiribath. There was a nice B'day cake as well. Indaka the CEO of Navantis SL thanks every one for supporting Navantis to grow like this.






Happy B'day Navantis SL....

For more photos visit my Picasa Web Album.
 

Embedding Slideshow for Picasa Web Albums to my blog

I alway wanted to put a slide show of my Picasa web album photos in my blog. Now I found a way to archive it. It is a Java script created by phydeaux3. I fond the news while I'm reading the blog Googel Operating Systems. Java script is quite customizable and It's very cool. You can add it to blogger as a HTML widget. (You have to use Blogger beta for this.). Try it and enjoy.....
 

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