Rajdhani Express - Trivandrum to Cochin

I finally travelled the ultimate luxury of trains in India! I have been travelling in trains for quite a long time as I was in the hostel at Rani Public School which is about 6 hrs on train from Cochin. Last month I got this really great chance to travel from Trivandrum to Cochin on the Queen of all trains in India - the Rajdhani Express

Its been quite a while since Kerala got its private radio stations and Cochin is the last city to join the party. I never thought radio was boring since its quite an engaging thing while driving or while just taking a rest at the couch. I usually tune into the All India Radio once in a while in the evenings where Rainbow FM plays the latest hindi tracks and the RJ’s are pretty cool too. If you looking for the stations in Cochin now, this post by Mahesh will help.

On 29th March, the refund of my Rediff Scam money was completed. A 30+ Days refund period??

Last week, I got a call from Ms. Minal Joshi who was talking about me enrolling as a Business associate with Rediff and selling their products. I think I did enroll for their program without my knowledge, thanks to the very user friendly interface. Yea, I am still sore about loosing my domain. A mistake I will regret all my life.

The title should not really be what blogging bought me, its more like what my online activity bought me. But then, blogging got me introduced to making money online, then to macro sites, niche sites and all that. I never really invested anything I made online back into the business expect for buying new domains and starting over with some other niche site. Thank you blogging and my readers who indirectly helped me buy it.

Happened last weekend and I absolutely have no idea why it happened. I added my site to the webmaster central and within a week my PageRank is like poof! Gone! It does not really mean much to me on this site since I do not sell pagerank here, so advertisements are not a reason.

Alexa ranks hates this blog since every other week its only going downwards, so does PR now. Technorati refuses to index my new links and hence a stagnant ranking there. All this makes my blog pretty much useless to potential advertisers. The traffic to the blog has only been growing all these days and I end up being bitch slapped?

Each time I decide I should be posting more frequently on this blog, something or the other keeps coming up. Yea, Fricking excuses. I know. February was a great month of sorts with the first weekend spent at the Barcamp. It was a great event with great participation and even greater people. I have to say, that spending time with those thinking like you, greatly changes the way you look at things.

Event details

Feb 3
9:30 A.M.

Venue (fixed)
DOE (Department of Electronics) Seminar Hall CUSAT
Thrikkakara Campus

You are informally invited to join us at the BarCamp in Kerala along with your pillows and your loudest snore. It will be greatly appreciated if you can blog about it or spread the word about it somehow or the other. If you blog about it, tell me so that I can add up to the list here.

• Bin-Co Blog
• Kenney Jacob
• CodLib
• Your blog link here

Stray dogs need to be protected, for the better of poor bike riders like me.

You should probably know by now that I am not a biker as such. Bikes for me are just point A to B transport hardware. Yesterday me and my friend were going out shopping small time when a stupid stray dog jumped into the wheels of the bike and me took off much like Superman to the road and in the process scratching my left hand pretty badly and my legs my friend has 2 brake light sized scratches on his knees

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to connect with more techies and webbies offline and hence have a pool of contacts I can always count on to have a drink or a watch a movie together or maybe simply ask about their adsense earnings for the week ;). Orkut was my first stop to find some people offline at my place Cochin. I found a few really interesting people and got in touch with them. It was really great to meet up with them, a bunch of techies who are warm and made me regret I had not taken this decision earlier :). No dollars ever earned gave me the feeling of happiness when people recognize your site and appreciate it. You need to feel it to actually understand what I am trying to say.

Yesterday night at about approx 2100 hrs IST I realized why Eve tasted the forbidden Apple after all! Why? How? What and all those answers coming right up! I reached back in Cochin yesterday night after visiting my School - Rani Public School in Vadakara, Calicut. I finally had to chance to collect some important documents after 3 years of passing out.

So, whats this got to do with Eve and the forbidden Apple? Cochin to Vadakara is about 250 Kms or 155 miles. I was told that the riding my bike all the way totally stupid according to most of my friends considering the state of roads in Kerala. Here is what I travelled the distance in:

Usually the New Year for me meant getting drunk and partying out on the roads with friends doing things that are usually illegal and totally stupid. This year I chose to do something different and try slide into the new year than try to run head on into it with a bottle of Vodka!

A lot of people who have spent the last week of a year in Cochin will agree with me that it is the best place to have a smashing Christmas and a New Year. I know a lot of people who want to have some real fun (legal and illegal ) come from places like Banglore and other South Indian cities.

Just to clarify my status, I just wanted to tell a few fans (mainly myself ) of my blog and other readers that Anand is not dead yet! I was putting up posting to the next day all these days mainly due to laziness and pressure at college and other not so life threating problems. So what was I upto all these days?

• I had the first flight travel of my life on 18th Oct. 2007 to Chennai in Indian Airlines from my home town Cochin. And good things come in a big box, I had my return in the evening in Deccan Air.

I can finally say that I have quit the worst habit that I had from my school days. Its been about a week or even more since I officially declared my hostility to the habit. I cannot really say it was a walk in the park or anything close to it. I was smoking more than once an hour until last week.

The desire to quit had been on my mind for sometime now, but I never gave it much of a thought till someone very special made me realize a lot of things and gave me hopes of life beyond 32.

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Today I had a trip from my home in Cochin, to my family temple at Peruvambu, near Palghat. The trip was around 200Kms in total, a journey that should have been a breeze in about 5-7 hours took a gruelling 9 hours in total and my backbone is like the suspension of a fully loaded trucker, all bended up and sprained

I have no words at the moment to explain my happiness. I am quiet only cuz I don’t want to wake the neighbors and have them yelling at me! India just won the best semi-finals in Twenty-20 world cup to reach the finals beating the unbeatable Australians! Its a great feeling to win over a team that has been on a winning spree and are formidable world champions Yee Hah!

But I missed the other semi finals between New Zealand and Pakistan earlier today. But a search on Google gave me the answer to that too. I was surprised to find this result:

I found that a lot of people are using minisites about different topics to make money with adsense and other programs. Lot of webmasters feel that they should have a lot of sites in different niches to get a decent income without much trouble.

What are minisites? They are small sites with information about a topic and the subjects around it written with SEO in mind to obtain high results for a set of keywords to bring in traffic.

Are you the #1 out there? I am usually asking this since I have seen a few #1’s being toppled off by others. These new #1’s are then toppled by others and so on. It is usually very easy to target the numero uno and try to overtake them. But staying at the top is pretty difficult since you have to do things done by none, you have no guiding light and have to tread ways untread paths.

I was thinking on the lines of a competition for my new top secret project: Shymz which led me to look around for fresh ideas. I found that a lot of sites are running new competitions for various prizes and stuff to be won.

With blog contests becoming a rage all over the blogosphere, I was wondering if it will help you in anyway to increase your statistics online.

By stats, I mainly refer to:

• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rankings
• Technorati

This is the email I got the other day. It contained Google Ads in it. Initially I thought it was a mistake, but once I clicked on the ad I was certain that it was google ads. Here is the screenshot. I was wondering how ignorant people are about the adsense TOS. I doubt if this type of ads violation will go unnoticed for long. Have you seen this before?

Happy Weekend folks! Its the festival of Onam here at my place, Cochin in Kerala. Celebrations are in full swing with everyone in a holiday mood for the next 3 days. Its time for a great traditional feast and a change from the usual burgers and pizzas

Do you have it in you to make money? Make them in hard cold cash? Live with it? Do you earn or make them?

Almost everyone employed earns them, even I did till the end of last month. I was working at a telecom company here, Airtel, Cochin as a Retention Officer. I earned about 121$ a month. Yea, people still work for that kind of money, even less. My job was to retain customers leaving our Telephone and Broadband service. I left it last month to concentrate harder on my college and to take care of some inherited business. But I was totally new to this whole “make money online” concept. But I learned quickly, thanks to a million blog out there. When I read about people making 3+ figures of income online, I was interested. My first full time job paid me only 75$ !

I have had bad experiences with many companies like most others. But all the while I try to console myself thinking its about the people in the system, not the company itself. But when it becomes once too many, I decide to blog about it! what better way to let others know?

Earlier I had written about the war against mosquitoes. As I said, the mosquitoes have grown immune to the mp3 mosquito irritate-tor also! But since the life must go on and on, humans have devised more methods to get rid of these irritating pests. One of the methods that is getting increasingly popular here is the mosquito bat. It looks like a shuttle bat which has a electric net in it, you can switch it and - zap! Kill all those blood drinking bastards!

I had written earlier that I was going to quit my day job at Airtel in Cochin and start concentrating on my studies and my online activities. But due to some reason or the other, for the better or the worse I am still with Airtel Broadband and Telephone Services.

I work in the retention team here in Cochin. My job? Bring back customers who are leaving us. That’s my job profile in one line. Customer retention is a major concern for every telecom operator all over the global village. Recently Economic Times published statistics that says that 1/4th of the customer base moves between the operators in a year! Most companies have realised or are in the process of realising that a customer retained is better than two customers acquired.

It is hell.
My city - Cochin, also called the commercial capital of Kerala, is fast becoming the capital for advanced breeding of mosquitoes. These things are smart as far as I can see, they have survived the worst of human attempts to eradicate them, growing immune to most repellents. There is no such thing as a peaceful evening with these pesky little insects around. Serious.

Why? Why does the mosquito always buzz in my ears? How does it know where exactly my ears are? Why does it only attack me? And why is Tommy(My more blood containing dog) left in peace? A million questions with answers no where in sight!