It was another farewell lunch for my very own manager at newly opened "Kona Grill" restaurant .
A sudden surprising layoff of my manager was shocking thing for our entire team. So lesson to learn is, when mass lay off are announced they don’t differentiate anybody.
Seems like its gonna be long, dark, cold and never-ending winter this year.
It just early December and It’s already snowing few days a week and average temperature is in 30’s. Everyday it’s take extra 10 mins to get ready to wear all those winter jackets and gloves. Cleaning the snow and ice off car windshield is another painful task.
Back from vacation, had a perfect flight timing -departure from Mumbai at 01:10 am and arrival at JFK at morning 07:30 am, just to attend Monday’s full day office. The total 15 hrs non-stop flight was all empty, making room for us to sleep and this time the flight entrainment system was indeed working.
Immigration, Custom and Airport shuttle was quick one, only complain is about this long chilly December.
As expected from the talented director Imtiaz Ali, this one meets the expectation.
It was a real joy to see this movie on big 70 mm screen with those beautiful location from Northern India.
This was a true colorful fresh movie, specially after watching bluish and greenish Saawariya on previous day.
Saawariya - a wasted efforts. Due to the other sold out box office movies, we were forced into this movie, just to come out disappointed by wasting our money on expensive ticket as well as on those much needed pop-corns to pass the time.
This was the worst experience I had, while booking the Air India tick
et thru careless, stupid travel agent. First this fellow didn’t have any clue about the ticket after charging my credit card, which he didn’t bother to inform me for 2 weeks. When I followed up, he gave some ridiculous excuses, which just wasted my days. After speaking to agency owner he transferred the matter to another lady, who cancelled the previous ticket and recharged credit card for new e-tickets. All this was happening with in the last week of travel date, making you more anxious.
Due to the double charging of tickets, credit card was almost reached to credit limit. Finally when they’re unable to issue e-tickets, they issued old paper tickets, which were collected by friend on my behalf.
The big surprise was waiting for me on monday morning, when I saw only two paper tickets. After waiting for an hour for the opening of their shop, they said they issued one e-ticket for me and paper tickets for my family.
It was rather a simple task, booking a ticket ! but took plenty of phone calls then follow up calls and the painful one, i.e. checking your mailbox everyday for the delivery of tickets. It just adds up unnecessary stress during those vacation days.
Its just reminds me of the MakeMyTrip.com’s commercial ad.
On a same note, soon the paper ticket will become a collector's item. The global airlines body IATA has placed its last order for paper tickets, clearing the way for air travel to be based entirely on electronic ticketing from 1st June 2008.
Our old TV suddenly stopped working, Not that we are much into TV, But having a not working TV in home makes you miserable . You never imagine that, you would miss it so much.
Most of September month went waiting for those few important letters, which were critical for out India vacation trip planning. Finally, when they arrived they arrived all together and patience paid off.
Every now and then you get requirement to produce ad-hoc report or data extract for given sets of excel data. User might provide you names, IDs for which he is expecting the results, but the problem is putting all that input data into your SQL queries in a way that it will fulfill the Syntax.
For ex.
SELECT company_id, address, city, state, country
FROM company
WHERE company_name in (('IBM','Oracle','Apple','Google','MicroSoft')
--List of names given by user (without quotes and comma separated):-
IBM
Oracle
Apple
Google
MicroSoft
It is doable when the list is small containing 10/20 items, But it becomes tedious & impractical to do it manually when list has 1000’s of items.
So while extracting such data yesterday, I found an easy and effortless way of achieve this thing using Microsoft Excel.
Here are Pictorial step-by-step instructions:
First Select the required columns (Cell)
Then using right click select the ‘Format Cell’ Option
Then use ‘Custom’ and Type as ‘@’, and click OK.
I hope after this win, We don't have to wait for next 24 yrs for the another world cup. Certainly, This win is precious for the India and will be treasured for the years to come. For me, I am just making a note here.
Thanks to the corporate free tickets, It was economical to visit this Bronx Zoo with the family of four people.
We specially enjoyed the first ever Camel Ride and the Tiger mountain experience.
Thou due to late arrival, we couldn't cover the entire Zoo, but were able to visit the main attractions.
This was a tiring family visit to New York city on the occasion of parents visit, by this time I've become a professional guide who can cover most of the NYC attractions in half a day starting with Grand Central, Park Ave, United Nation, Statue of Liberty, Wall Street, NYSE, Ground Zero (WTC), Time Square and Empire State and in the end serving the dinner in Indian Restaurant.
