Off to Sharjah

Off to Sharjah to meet couple of friends who landed into UAE, couple of weeks back during the conference frenzy, see you guys on Friday now.

Btw one of them is Silent Spring too :D.

Updates:

Oh well ok I couldn’t go grrrrr, car isn’t ready yet ab will get it tomorrow at noon that means I will have to drive in most hot conditions to Dubai :( sad, very very sad. Conference was hectic(to say the least) full time, at the end of the I used to get soo tired that coming online felt like a hard task. Providing technical support seems easy but its not. I mean most of the time you are waiting for someone to call you up for some help and waiting is a pain. So when doing nothing I was just walking in corridor or sitting somewhere doing nothing just waiting. Hardly any paper was of interest to me just attended 2-3 to be max. God knows how many different types of USB flash memories I saw in those 3 days really of all kinds and shapes :P and tell me why would people walk away with laser pointers grrrrrr these are professors I am talking about. lol ok in one funny incident this guest speaker from Australia after his presentation was having coffee in another room. That time I was in the main hall uploading some presentations and I could hear someone talking but there was no one else inside the hall and then I realized this guy has this wireless mic in his pocket and its on and all his chatting was making its way into the hall :D, good for him no one else listened to his talking.

Attendance itself was very disappointing I was told. Crowd would go maximum just before lunch as expected :P, yeaaaa foood was free and foood was good and it is nothing like free food and awesome desserts :D, yaaaay.

This colleague of mine who is senior to me, plus the main IT coordinator for the conference had a row with our director and decided to skip the conference. It was a complete misunderstanding and he acted like a kid so hence more load on me. But in a sense it was good because he really bosses around and tries to be over efficient (I hate people who are complete opposite of what they want others to be) so I didn’t have him on my head which was quite relaxing plus that way I got to know many people and it turned out to be a good network builder though not sure how much it will help. But it feels good when you earn people’s respect. Anyhow enough of this time to sleep and now tomorrow in scorching heat I will be off to Dubai.

Absence

Driving with one hand that too while holding a big ass banner which is half a feet outside your car with another hand and that too in a city which seems like was designed around roundabouts is not easy I tell you. This was yesterday and what was going on in previous nineteen days well not much different, ok I wasn’t holding out banners and driving. But the story is exactly after seven hours, 7th Annual Research Affairs Conference will commence. This is the thing for our department infact I would say the only time of year when everyone from our department is actually working :P. Infect I would say it is one of the major events in University’s Calendar. So from making 170 slides presentation to updating conference’s website(which includes putting up 200+ links). Not to forget the marathon effort to extract individual research papers from huge pdfs, took two working days to do that and in the end I hated the word pdf :P. Thanks to C# atleast I was able to save myself from creating the web based table of contents, other wise in yester years my colleague used to do it manually(sheeesh) and yea along with those quite a many outside work which are so much part of such conferences and exhibitions. Anyhow I have a bad headache right now, its 2:20 at night and I have to be up in 3 hours. So this was the only reason of me being away from blog I wasn’t just finding time to write about anything though not much wasn’t happenin, oh yea did I mention I scratched my car against a cement column while attempting a suicidal parking maneuver . Ok it is not that bad just slight dents on right hand side doors but problem is since I didn’t know the rules here hence I didn’t bother to call the police and now I have discovered that nobody would repair those dents unless I get clearance from police that it was not a hit and run situation jeeeeeeeeez. And when I called up police two days after the incident the police walas tell me to take my car again to that spot and stand there in a similar way as I was then, call 999( which is similar to 911) and tell them that I have hit my car just now and come and give me clearance grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Pathans I tell you. Sometimes I feel living in Pakistan is so easy :P. oh well so I have talked to my driving instructor he knows someone there and will let me know what to do tomorrow so that’s it so now how many think I don’t deserve this car :P???

Presentation woes

Ok there was this presentation I was given the task to prepare it. It was supposed to highlight the vision, the mission and all the services and the rest of bla bla of what our Department does or the ones which come under it do. In short it had to be a marketing thingy. Plus my manager wanted it to be “lively” which frankly I cudnt understand shroo mein what exactly he meant :P. Saadat made me a nice looking template infect two and I chose one, thanks bud :D. Problem was how and really how will I make it lively? My creativity requires a lot to be desired in this particular domain.

Had to read a 30 pages document to take out material from it good thing it had graphs in it so I was able to use them to make it “lively” plus google images rocks to gather related images. Then also I took out a 50 second piece from an instrumental to make it background loop and then with the help of PowerPoint transitions a nice “lively” looking presentation was made. There is a software Camtasia Studio(it is basically a movie maker) which can capture screen from PowerPoint slideshow and convert it into a movie format(which was another requirement , sigh) good thing it saves the transitions as they were so I just added the music loop with the help of this studio(it could have been done with PowerPoint too but this Studio gave me better flexibility) and voila it was ready. But all of this costed some long hours at work and my weekend and couple of nighters. The Good Thing he liked it (Thank God) and appreciated the “liveliness” :P , Bad Thing he suggested some features which he saw in some other presentation somewhere and wants something like this in this presentation too(grrrrrrrrrrrrr see this is the problem of producing good results, people tend to think you can do anything, everything and it happens everywhere). I will see what I can do about it, khair that’s about it. And this was keeping me from blogging.

Last week this stupid vending machine in one of the college’s building ate my 2 dirhams sigh sad :(. I inserted the coins, pressed the code for m&mz( really felt like having it) and kapooot the packed got stuck onto the coil and even after considerable pushing and kicking it never fell :( (It has happened before but then pushes did the trick). I called up the guy who maintains it and he was supposed to call me up the next day but sigh that never happened. Happens I guess.